Manufacturing Landscape It's a Sunny Morning in Santiago, Chile's Capital. Tamara Pérez and Antonella Mele Are Standing In
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Manufacturing Landscape Words Frederico Duarte Photographs Cristóbal Olivares It’s a sunny morning in Santiago, Chile’s capital. Tamara Pérez and Antonella Mele are standing in what was once the dining room of a pretty 1960s apartment building in Providencia, a mainly residential quarter of the Chilean capital. Stood in silence, they are slowly and gently applying a black, grainy substance to a bulky stoneware object placed on the table in front of them. 72 Duarte, Frederico. “Manufacturing Landscape,” Disegno, April 2017. Tamara Pérez examining the lava In the adjacent room – surely a former living room – fabric, as if held by a kind hand. In 2016, three of products in GT2P’s studio, Santiago. the other members of the design studio Great Things these vases were included in the Italian furniture to People (GT2P) sit at laptops, scribbling on a brand Cappellini’s Progetto Oggetto collection, whiteboard-top table, talking on the phone, chatting. and are currently being manufactured in &OHMBOE A breeze flows through the many open windows and The second direction is CPP No2: Porcelain vs Lava doors of the ground-floor apartment, which is Lights, a series of wall lamps and chandeliers for sparsely furnished, and whose somewhat disorderly which GT2P perfected the casting process by rooms reveal models, materials, bits of prototypes, controlling the clay layers and therefore the tools, books, magazines. In one of these rooms a 3D thickness and translucency of the resulting shallow, porcelain printer is being installed. In the kitchen creamy white porcelain bowls. While working on there’s instant coffee and the odd ceramic cup on these lights the studio began to experiment with the counter, another porcelain printer and a kiln, lava samples collected from Chile’s Chaitén and where Pérez and Mele will soon place the object Villarrica volcanoes, performing heating and they have been working on. This is one of many steps in the process through which GT2P is designing a manufacturing method from a mineral both abundant Remolten shows how and overlooked in its home country – lava. Pérez and her partner Guillermo Parada founded designers can create work GT2P in 2009 with fellow architect Sebastián Rozas and engineer Eduardo Arancibia. Victor Imperiale, that is culturally challenging also an architect, joined in 2012. GT2P first became known in Chile and abroad for its application of and economically ambitious parametric design to installations that it designed for public places, such as the Flat Hex ceiling for the by prizing knowledge Hyundai VIP showroom in Santiago or the Vibración Parronal structure for the Health Care Center No1 in over commodity. Rancagua. Yet it was its parametric design approach to small-scale manufacturing that saw GT2P enter cooling tests, as well as using different casting the international circuit of collectible design fairs materials and playing with other variables. During and galleries. The first example of this approach is this process, the members of GT2P failed to find Less CPP No1, the porcelain printer stood in the an existing set of parameters or a theoretical studio’s kitchen. This is one of the analogue machines framework that they could work with using lava. with which GT2P has advanced the idea that So they decided to develop one. This was the start parametric design is not necessarily a digital of Remolten, a research project that, despite computation methodology. CPP, which stands for its domestic, haphazard beginnings, offers a striking Catenary Pottery Printer, translates computational example of how designers can create work that logics and automation processes by articulating, in is culturally challenging and economically ambitious real time, physical variables such as gravity or the by prizing knowledge over commodity. position and number of anchor points in XYZ on a When hardened, the lava that flows out of large wooden frame from which a piece of fabric Chile’s 80 currently active volcanoes turns into (gauze, muslin, lycra) is hung. By pouring different Andesite. This porous, lightweight black rock can clays (earthenware, stoneware, porcelain) over these be found in and around the 2,900 volcanoes that fabrics and allowing them to drip through, the dot the Chilean side of the Andes, but also in places printer produces non-standard, slip-cast ceramic such as Slovakia, Norway and Mars. While working on vessels, each displaying the delicate folds and the Tarrugao vases GT2P read online that Andesite textures of their mould. melts at the same temperature that porcelain boils. After its launch in 2013 the project evolved in With this in mind, the studio applied lava shavings to two directions. The first, Tarrugao, is a series of the porcelain vases in its kitchen kiln. The first tests white porcelain vases that resemble softly wrinkled revealed the Andesite samples melted at 1,260°C, not Process Duarte, Frederico. “Manufacturing Landscape,” Disegno, April 2017. designers such as Ettore Sottsass, Ron Arad, social, commercial and political impact. This Antonella Melle pours stoneware clay into a mould. Fernando and Humberto Campana and the estate conservative understanding of the discipline – on of Shiro Kuramata, later working with a younger which so much of the historiography, but also the generation of designers such as Joris Laarman, Paul contemporary collections of decorative arts and Cocksedge and Nendo’s Oki Sato, with whom they – design museums are still based – is perpetuated by or rather Benda; Friedman retired in 2014 – work a design media more concerned with novelty and to create “things that didn’t exist before.” It is a statement that commits Friedman Benda to an interpretation of design as a forward-looking, When hailing from a research-led activity. Gallery representation thus provides commercial and artistic guidance peripheral country like Chile, to designers, but also the financial support that enables them to undertake long-term projects. designers are often expected Remolten, which was launched at the Salon Art & Design Fair last November almost two years after to create work that through Benda’s trip to Chile, is one such project. At Design Miami in December 2016 the gallery sold all the material or semantic choices Remolten No1: Revolution Series in its booth. Orders continued to arrive in the next few weeks from echoes a local identity. collectors, but also from museum curators such as Christian Larsen at the .&5 in New York 3FNPMUFO celebrity than with the appropriateness or -JHIUT and Ewan McEoin at the National Gallery of consequence of everyday and often anonymous Victoria in Melbourne 4UPPM . For Benda, these acts and products of design. acquisitions point to an “overlap with contemporary Perhaps this is a curator’s, editor’s, or historian’s curatorial thinking”, vindicating his gallery’s purpose predicament. A gallerist such as Benda, who claims of being “an intermediate between museums and to have “no interest in the mass market”, instead research.” As such, a project like Remolten appeals puts luxury itself in perspective. “When you have to curators with “an interest in Latin American the means to acquire beautiful things, everything design, or working on an exhibition on heat, or is a luxury,” he says, stating that “99 per cent of on a massive triennial aiming for material and people” don’t buy what his gallery sells as an geographical diversity,” says Benda. investment, but as something that fulfils their This curatorial appeal gives lie to the idea that aesthetic and intellectual expectations. In “design galleries such as Friedman Benda are just retailers art”1 – a term coined in 1999 by Alexander Payne, aimed at the rarefied, luxury objet d’art market – worldwide director of design at the Phillips auction a world in which a lava-clad stoneware stool comes house – authorship, provenance and semantics with a four-figure price tag. By financing projects matter. In this context, designer-authors, much such as Remolten, galleries create a framework like artists, increase the meaning and value for new designers, processes and materials to of their work by adding a name, a story and be developed, shown and found by collectors, a statement. When hailing from a peripheral curators, editors and, eventually, manufacturers. country like Chile, designers are often expected Commercially, this framework allows design to create work that through material or semantic research to happen outside the mainstream choices echoes a local or national identity – furniture and home accessories industry, while also however elusive or stereotypical it may be. These creating B niche, nimble market for the results of expectations render, say, Fernando and Humberto that research. Culturally, however, this framework Campana’s furniture as Brazilian, but not Julien reinforces an understanding of design where Macdonald’s clothes as Welsh, or any designer appreciation of the formal, symbolic and discursive who works with cork as Portuguese. In a 2008 qualities of rarefied artefacts conceived for an elite overshadows a broader examination of design’s 1 See ‘Under the Hammer’ in Disegno #11. 78 Duarte, Frederico. “Manufacturing Landscape,” Disegno, April 2017. at the 800°C as indicated on the websites they the work of two people on the project for six months had found. The Andesite remained in a viscous and, crucially, to buy the kiln that now stands in state and was still manageable at 1,300°C, the the studio’s kitchen. temperature at which porcelain bakes. Then, This was when the real research behind Remolten through a series of further tests, GT2P realised that started. The first strand entailed sourcing the raw by controlling the heating and cooling curves, but material. Unlike other rocks such as limestone or also the expansion and contraction of both materials, granite, which have been made over thousands the two materials could be made to work together: of years either by the accumulation of calcium the molten lava adhered to the biscuit – or bisque, carbonate sediments or the crystallisation of magma a kind of unglazed porcelain – on a first firing.