If the ground floor of the house of the north of Deyan Sudjic looks a little naked – all white walls, stripped floors, high ceilings and smooth steel kitchen – it is used for the best to display furniture. It is, in its own way, exactly the house that you could expect that the former director of the Design Museum in London has: a perfect backdrop for a collection, in this case, of remarkable chairs, in a neighborhood with kindness and filth at hand.
These exhibitions, however, are not on pedestals but in daily use: a set of Hans Wegner catering chairs, a Gerrit Rietveld A red and blue armchair that always looks ridiculously modern despite its design of more than a century, and a pair of Alvar Aalto vintage plywood stools placed side by side under the large window of the kitchen.
If something happens in the early elegant house of Victorian, it is not modernist furniture but rather a elaborate stone chimney, clearly an import from France and the air a little arrogant in this very British interior. “Before buying it,” explains Sudjic, 72 Jasper Conran And John Galliano. They had their studio on the top floor. He was renovated by (British architect) Nigel Coates, but unfortunately, the people to whom they sold it had completely renovated. The chimney is one of the few things that survives this previous period. »»
His last incarnation was designed “with a little advice from John PawsonSaid Sudjic. It shows. In particular in the soil, whose boards seem unusually wide. “Some of them go to the end,” he said. “We had to get a crane to bring them.” We direct upstairs. Harry Bertoia chair dressed in purple velvet, a Jasper Morrison Sofa, a Le Corbusier chair, a Marcel Breuer coffee table and the inevitable and perhaps unusual shelves of Dieter Rams for Votecarefully full of books.
It is almost a relief to find an old bed of wooden flesh and a pair of catering chairs that came from the house of the Sudjic stepfather, the architect John Miller. Sudjic's wife, Sarah Miller, founding editor of the United Kingdom Condé Nast Traveler The magazine which now runs a brand advice (she is absent on an exotic photo shoot during my visit), is of an architectural dynasty: her mother-in-law was known Rogers, wife of Richard Rogers who once had a practice with him. “Sarah tries to implement a policy of a book in, a book,” explains Sudjic. “It doesn't work so well.”
Sudjic himself (his parents emigrated to the United Kingdom of the former Yugoslavia) began with the training as an architect, although quickly gravity towards the media. He was co-founder of Plan Magazine in 1983, a Grand, Lush and Consciously Cool magazine which gathered the disparate tentacles of the London design scene then to suggest more consistency than there is probably never. When I ask him where he thinks now that design goes, four decades after his foundation PlanHe said, not necessarily useful: “I am always a little suspicious of the word” conception “, as if it was a thing. This is not the case, it is a method. “
Maybe. But the house of the co-founder of the former design magazine leader of the United Kingdom and former director of the Design Museum It certainly seems to have a lot of design. I ask if he thinks there could be too many chairs in the world? He adopts a slightly painful expression. “As Jasper Morrison said, we don't need to design a new chair just to refine an existing.”
Sudjic ends a book on the furniture manufacturer Glass. The company has licenses to make some of the best known and appreciated modernist conceptions, from Charles and Ray Eames to Jean Prouvé and Hella Jongerius, and an impressive museum in Germany. Now, under the direction of CEO Nora Fehlbaum, this makes a radical evolution towards sustainability. “His former CEO, Nora's uncle) Rolf Fehlbaum, is a very unusual businessman. He has a doctorate in the utopian industrial colonies and what he built in Weil Am Rhein, with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza and others is like a contemporary version of something by Tomáš Baťa or Robert Owen. Another could have done it.
Vitra is a remarkable company. But it is joined in the design ecosystem by hundreds of other outfits that project rapid fashionable furniture, endless chairs, sofas and unpleasant coffee tables. Isn't there too much production in the design now? Even Vitra himself admits that his Eames carts are at high CO2 intensity. “What makes (Vitra) different”, insists Sudjic, “is that it is designed to last 50 years. If you were today a refrigerator of the 1950s or a car, they would both have an eccentric air. Compared to all the other objects designed in 1956, I think that this chair (he nods towards the Lounger) lasted quite well.”
While we look around, more and more chairs are starting to trigger anecdotes, from a fantastic weight Cassin Superleggera by Gio Ponti (that he was given as a former editor -in -chief of the Italian Domus Magazine) to a big design from Ron Arad made from an old car rover seat that looks rare. Is he a collector? “Oh no, I'm far too disorganized to be a real collector,” he said. “Maybe more an accumulator.”
All these chairs could have integrated more easily into one of its old houses. “When we started PlanI lived in a wapping loft big enough to cycle. It was a bit like living on the set of Long Friday Friday. The river had such a presence at the time, but it was very calm. “He continues:” At that time, I thought that an architectural publisher should put his money where his mouth is, so I loaded John McASlan to design a living pod in the middle of the attic. ” His first apartment was designed by the Czech architect emigrated Jan Kapallicktes. Anyone who has seen Kaplický media stand on the London cricket field will know exactly what it means.
Towards the top of the house, hiding in a corridor is still another remarkable chair, a little a miniature throne with its padding replaced by sparkling brass. “This was designed by Rei Kawakubo,” he said. “She gave it to me when I wrote a book on her.” Paul Smith introduced it to the designer like boys during a trip to Japan. “I went to visit textile mills with her, and I went to the Paris projection of her collections, where John Malkovich and Julian Sands were models. At the same time, I watched an Issey Miyake store designed by Shiro Kuramata, and the separation line between design, fashion and architecture began to dissolve. ” He always gets his costumes from the tailor -made operation of Paul Smith (“it's a very good thing, a tailor -made costume”).
No longer directing the design museum, for which he instructed John Pawson to reinvent the wonderful institute of the Midcentry Commonwealth as a new Kensington house, you might think that Sudjic slowed down. But he writes books, see you soon his Vitra volume, modifies an annual design magazine, AnimaAnd is a professor of architecture and design at Lancaster University. And he regularly plunges his toes into newspaper journalism, which he still clearly likes. “Really, it's a curiosity license, right?” I agree, while I get rid around my shelves one last time.
