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Sitting comfortably? Melbourne Design Week 2017 puts the spotlight on chairs
By Ray Edgar
Porky Hefer's Fiona Blackfish chair might look like an inflatable toy with an invitingly comfortable pink tongue, but his killer whale has a deadly message. The South African designer wants you to relax in the belly of the beast while reflecting on the plight of his country's endangered species.
One of the NGV's recent design acquisitions, Fiona Blackfish (2015), is a reminder that a chair isn't just for sitting. It supports ideas, invention and ideals. It resonates across cultures and through time. Under these weighty layers the chair also carries personal significance.
Masanori Umeda, Rose; armchair 1989 designed, 2016 manufactured; cotton/silk velvet, polyurethane foam, plywood, synthetic polyester wadding, steel, aluminium, plastic, 80x90x82cm, NGV.
But does the world need another chair?
"It continues to have an extraordinary hold over designers," says NGV design curator Simone LeAmon, who has just added 33 chairs by 30 contemporary designers to the NGV collection. "This collection is an exercise in trying to understanding what the allure is.
Nipa Doshi, Principessa daybed 2008; wood, polyurethane foam, wool, silk, vinyl, other materials; NGV.Credit: Jeremy Dillon
"The chair is like a business card for a designer," she adds. "In a chair you can see their personal design philosophy."
Collected over the past two years under the auspices of the Gordon Moffatt Gift, the NGV chair collection provides the headline act – Creating the Contemporary Chair – of Melbourne Design Week.
It is the first of four annual Melbourne Design Week programs that the NGV will deliver for Creative Victoria. While the NGV provides the hub, activities occur across the city, overseen by LeAmon and fellow curators Ewan McEoin and Timothy Moore. Design Values is this year's overarching theme: what does design value, and what do we value in design? Sustainability may be an obvious concern but the program includes talks that question what a queer architecture might look like and how to make Indigenous design more visible.
Through the seemingly humble chair, LeAmon examines the values that preoccupy designers across five narratives: Invention, Lineage, Diffusion, Idealism and Individualism.
Nipa Doshi, Principessa daybed 2008 (detail); wood, polyurethane foam, wool, silk, vinyl, other materials; NGV.Credit: Jeremy Dillon
How, for instance, does design embed scientific knowledge into commerce? How do we make a chair faster, cheaper and lighter to perform better for consumers and manufacturers? "We've come a long way from Verner Panton's first plastic cantilevered chair of the 1960s," says LeAmon. "There are plastics available that Panton could only have dreamed of. They flow faster, don't go brittle under UV light, are far more resilient and adaptable to manufacturing processes."
The legacy of 20th century industrial production reverberates through inventive designs such as Jasper Morrison's Air chair (2000), the fastest produced chair in world. Using air moulding, a new chair pumps out in just seven-10 seconds.
Maarten Baas, Clay; dining chair 2006 designed, 2016 manufactured; synthetic polymer clay, steel, 75 x 45 x 35cm, NGV.
Inventiveness is not always about material and process. Thomas Heatherwick's Spun chair (2009) challenges the archetype of four legs, a seat and back, while Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf's Aeron (1994) upends the office chair.
"Who would have thought an ergonomic office chair could look like that?" asks LeAmon. "The Aeron reinvents the whole typology, from elasticine netting at the back to removing foam and wadding. This is a chair where skin and body are delivered in this one structure. It's radical and a pivotal work of industrial design."
Thomas Heatherwick, Spun; chair 2010 designed, 2015 manufactured; polyethylene,91x78cm, NGV.
Radicalism can be stylistic and cultural too. Masanori Umeda's Rose armchair is a signature example of provocative postmodernism. Not only does it resemble a flower, its lush hand-stitched silk-cotton velvet is constructed more like couture fashion than an industrial process favoured by modernists.
Philippe Starck's Louis Ghost chair (2002) reinterprets the classic French baroque chair in polycarbonate plastic. The double irony with Starck's democratisation of Louis XV style is that his own work has been pirated relentlessly. Designers may value material experimentation, but the public regularly prioritises price. The ramifications are serious, says LeAmon. The ubiquity and inevitability of copying scares off manufacturers from investing in research and development.
Porky Hefer, Fiona Blackfish; 2015 designed, 2016 manufactured; leather, steel and sheepskin, 170x164x135cm, NGV.
Perhaps individuality offers a means to avoid plagiarism. Rejecting uniformity and the homogeneity of manufacturing, studio-based designers such as Maarten Baas work in clay, while Chilean group GT2P (Great Things to People) experiments with volcanic rock farmed from Chile's Villarrica volcano to create the Revolution Remolten L stool (2015).
Yet originality also emerges through cross-pollination. With the Principessa daybed (2006), London-based studio Doshi Levien may epitomise the rise of multicultural design. Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's story of The Princess and the Pea, the daybed's multilayered mattress upholstery is produced by artisans in India appliqueing studio co-founder Nipa Doshi's personal effects. Like an elegant version of Tracey Emin's notorious Bed, Doshi's autobiographical object includes images of her United Nude shoes, sunglasses and hairdryer.
"Doshi's heritage informs the piece," says LeAmon. "It takes you to Denmark, Britain and India. It's an extraordinary piece of contemporary design that talks about how cultural influences are mixing to deliver things that we've never seen before."
Creating the Contemporary Chair, NGV International, March 16-26.
OTHER MELBOURNE DESIGN WEEK HIGHLIGHTS
Factories
Open House Melbourne curates Open State, a tour of design and manufacturing-themed buildings and factories including housing prefabrication plant Modscape, tram maker Bombardier, and the use of VR technology at City Power. "The point is to look at where manufacturers have been successful and how designers have helped manufacturers become successful, up-skill and upscale," says Emma Telfer, executive director of Open House Melbourne.
Fonts
Everyone has a favourite font. But what value judgments does a graphic designer make? "If you're typesetting a book of feminist theory, it's probably a good idea to use a typeface that's designed by a woman," says Brad Haylock, who hosts a symposium on type featuring London-based Czech Republic designer Radim Pesko. Similarly a book on American history should probably avoid a European font. "Discerning the value judgment behind these design decisions only becomes possible when we have some historical knowledge," says Haylock.
Augmented
From winning best in show at Beijing Design Week, the Innovators exhibition comes home to Monash University's New Horizons Building to showcase 16 contemporary Australian design objects. Using augmented reality technology, the exhibition includes Knog's award-winning Oi bike bell, the Flow Hive apiary and Outerspace Design's Fusion guitar, dubbed the world's smartest guitar.
ngv.vic.gov.au/melbourne-design-week-2