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20/20 Vision
Global designers discuss
how they transform groundbreaking thought into
reality.
 Creativity
lies within each of us. Bringing it to the surface
is the hard part. Even the most gifted designers
sometimes have trouble stimulating their imagination
for truly novel solutions. Perspective
asked a group of award-winning designers how inspiration
and innovation color their creative approach.
With their insights, these trendsetters open a
window into their thought process.
Riccardo Bianchini
In a single word, the greatest quality of an innovator
is curiosity. More articulately, an innovator
must ask questions before giving answers and try
to use these questions to examine the problem
from an unconventional point of view. A client
often has a blurry perception of what he really
needs, so the designer is responsible for suggesting
solutions the client can’t imagine by himself.
Today’s designers
must avoid the temptation to be in the next top
10 chart of most trendy designers of the month.
We actually live in a time that nurtures people’s
fears and anxiety. As designers, we can look beyond
trends and suggest how our clients will experience
the world in the future — the kinds of spaces,
collective as well as private, they will live
in. This already is possible if you carefully
read the signs in our everyday life.
Designers operate
to build environments that other people will live
in — people with various cultural backgrounds,
activities and interests — so every experience
in a designer’s life may influence his or
her work.
If a project is innovative,
it doesn’t matter how big it is. The only
difference is that a grand-scale innovation often
is appreciated by a lot of people in a short time,
while a small-scale one takes longer to propagate
its influence. It’s much more difficult to
say if this kind of influence will foster a new
design school or not.
Actually, there isn’t
an authoritative design school that deeply shapes
the way people live. Our world is too fast, too
frantic, with a lot of contradictory trends and
cross-contaminations. This situation led to the
coexistence of many small design schools with
a short-lived popularity. You can see the same
situation in music, fashion and figurative arts.
For example, in Italy, all the greatest design
masters now are very old, and there aren’t
young designers with a comparable influence.
Only a design school
that will take upon its shoulders the exigency
to give answers to people’s most profound
needs — environmental, economic, health —
may give our world a long-lasting shape.
Federica Lusiardi
Many times, a satisfying project originates from
a single, strong idea revealed by a long series
of complex choices; a great master like Achille
Castiglioni called this single idea “il componente
principale del progetto,” daringly translated
as “the crucial ingredient of a project,”
the soul of a project, the element that identifies
it and guides your work until it becomes a coherent
proposal.
This is sometimes an ambitious
path that makes you constantly verify the correctness
of your opinions, investigate unconventional uses
of materials and technology, and become a sterner
self-evaluator.
Contemporary designers in
Europe — but also now in the United States — must
deal inevitably with a significant cultural heritage.
You can use this legacy in many different ways.
You can steal a lot of stereotypical shapes someone
created in the past, or even in the modern era,
and merely reproduce them as a weak update, but
this means that you have no possibility to be
creative and certainly you will never be an innovative
designer.
Otherwise, you can assume
traditional solutions but, at the same time, use
them as a launching point to brand new, personal
research paths. In this case, there will be no
differences among traditional, modern and innovative.
You have to see yourself as an intelligent sponge
that absorbs your surroundings and transforms
them.
We are influenced by many
designers, including Achille Castiglioni, Steven
Hall or a young studio like Studio Azzurro, but
also by movie directors such as Kubrick and Hitchcock,
by literature, by our travels, by modern art or
even by our experiences with food.
We aim to use the designer’s
tools like the letters of an alphabet and to translate
emotions coming from different experiences into
a familiar language. For example, we currently
are working on a personal experiment: We are designing
a theoretical exhibition derived from three novels
by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It’s not
an exhibition about Calvino. Our purpose is to
translate the significance but also the impressions
every novel gave us into different environments
that can give the public similar perceptions —
above all, the psychological ones. It’s a
trial to check our ability using materials, lighting,
sounds and every other physical element that makes
an exhibition setup in terms of an idiom.
Johnson Chou
We live in an exciting, heterogeneous design milieu
where one can explore numerous fascinating ideas.
My design methodology is merely a framework that
I apply and test these ideas against. Currently
though, I find it much more interesting to have
my client’s aesthetic inclinations permeate
my visions, and I am always curious to see the
hybrid that results. Each project has its own
life, its own distinct expression that is a unique
coupling of both the clients’ and my own
conceptual pursuits.
My foremost source of inspiration
is a criticism of architecture that is mute, its
central theme focused on the urgent need for buildings
and spaces to engage the viewer or participant
on intellectual, emotional and physiological levels
of experience. But the most moving experience
I’ve had that continues to resonate and be
deeply formative was my trip to Le Corbusier’s
Chapel at Ronchamp, France.
More recently, the opening
of Archive Inc. in 1996, a fine arts gallery that
I co-own with Patricia Christie, revived and refocused
my interest in conceptual/installation art. The
artists themselves, many of whom we befriended,
were inspirational in their entrepreneurial, promotional
resourcefulness and passion for their work. That
experience served to rejuvenate the confidence
that was necessary for me to establish a design
practice in 1999.
Although my design philosophy
evolves with every project, there are currently
four conceptual streams that I apply to a project
either singularly or cumulatively. This methodology
adopts a phenomenological approach to design,
a process that attempts to develop an intensified
form of ritual and metaphor with an emphasis on
the sensory.
First, the notion of narrative,
activated by one’s movement though space,
is the creation of a story conveyed by the architectural
promenade wherein the form and details of the
interior elements are imbued with metaphoric content.
The second is the notion of architectural reduction,
or the search for the elemental. Third is the
articulation of the complex within the simple,
and of these elements’ paradoxical relationship,
and fourth being the transformational poetics
and programmatic invention as applied to both
objects and space.
I have always been fascinated
with objects and space that transform, and mutable
sculptural forms that are inflected by function — buildings
and spaces that transform, spaces animated by
the fascination and beauty of movement.
Of course, I would like
to consider my work as timeless, universal and
not susceptible to the vagaries of fashion or
trends, but perhaps that is naïve. My preoccupation
with utilizing translucency as a means of layering
views and encouraging movement has probably made
my work more of the moment, paralleling developments
in product design.
Collin Burry
I want to lead my clients and challenge myself
to find solutions that solve strategic, business,
functional and aesthetic issues in the simplest
possible fashion. I strive to do the best possible
work, to do something unique for every client.
Clients are the secret, untapped wealth of inspiration.
They help me find that gem of opportunity — no
matter how small the project or task at hand.
Initially, I think I saw
design as about aesthetically solving functional
problems. As I’ve grown, aesthetics and function
are still important, but finding ways to enhance
a client’s business and advancing the industry
have been added to the mix. I find that when we
speak solely about design, we lose our true advantage
as creative entities. Our clients view us as a
commodity, or someone who spends their money,
not someone who can help them make it.
I hope designers will take
the challenge to lead in the communities in which
we live and/or work. We affect people’s lives,
and I hope we are able to begin to quantify what
we do, thereby increasing our value in the free
market economy in which we live.
Globalism is becoming a
major contributor to and influence on our work.
As the shepherds and trusted advisors for these
new economies, what do we want to learn from where
we’ve been — where we can help them go?
Will the world end up continents of box retail,
office parks and strip malls?
I aspire to tread lightly
on this Earth, experience life and feed my endless
curiosity to learn about someone or something
— the brilliant creativity of nature and
other
designers. Ultimately, I want to do work that
transforms. I want to strive to do the right thing,
stay inspired and have fun on this journey.
Anouska Hempel
Design doesn’t just mean a pretty curtain;
it comes with a total concept of how to eat, how
to stand, how to live — all the things that
make a difference in life. In both classical and
contemporary design, the rules are the same, but
they’re written slightly differently. Classical
means detail, because inspiration comes from so
many different periods. You’ve got to follow
a rhythm that is detail-oriented for that period.
Contemporary also means detail, but in a very
different volume.
If you’re an innovator,
you can get away with messing the rules up. I
take more chances. I’m more spontaneous.
I’ll give a design a twist in the middle,
with the clarity coming from the architectural
side, to prevent the sterile feel. But you don’t
set out to do that — it just happens along
the way. For instance, if you think of a hotel,
when you walk in the front door with your Louis
Vuitton bag and your American Express Card, why
should all 47 potted orchids face the same way?
The lovely thing about confusion is that, in its
own way, it creates excitement.
When approaching a new project,
we rely on the solutions of the past. Our results
dictate our practice. There are certain things
we stick to, but I lead the team to create an
underground look as we’re doing it. Thought
goes from the nib of a pen, throughout the room,
out the chimney; it’s a complete connection
of past experience that leads you into the next
thing. Architecture and interior design have to
become a total experience.
The future of design will
involve ergonomics of living among the masses.
The young have their individual space, and relation
to their individuality is going to involve quite
a myopic experience as time goes on. The ability
to create privacy within the individual spaces
of our lives is going to mean smaller and smaller
solutions, but ones that are technically more
and more brilliant. The use of virtual reality
will make your living much freer; you’ll
be able to have any type of experience within
your own box.
If you think about hotel
living, it can mean a tired little room with a
bed, but the ceiling above you can represent the
whole dream sequence from a movie. You can turn
on your television and get into your fridge from
that same little box — it’s a whole different
way of living. It’s about how you divide
the space and the way you interpret it. It’s
the imagination of the architect or designer.
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