The Monocle Minute
On Design

As things heat up with the unveiling of the Paris 2024 Olympic torch, a Menorca house provides us with some cool relief. Plus: we take to the stage at a theatre festival in Zürich, visit an art house in Finland (pictured) and follow architectural artist Brian Clarke’s journey through the looking glass. But first, Yvonne Xu on how Singapore is reshaping its design future.

Mallorcan architect Esteve Torres Pujol drew inspiration from traditional shoe workshops in the Balearics when he designed the Julià Oriola House in Menorca. Located in a former garage, the sunny residence is set back from the road, providing a tranquil haven behind its external façade.

“We wanted to pay tribute to its simple exterior,” says Torres Pujol, whose firm, Estudi E. Torres Pujol, is based in Palma. The home’s garage-style opening allows the building to function as both a private and professional space for its resident artist: when open, it feels like a gallery, combining ambient natural light with the public area outside.

Design decisions were made to reflect the home’s Mediterranean location: there are rusty-orange interior accents, exposed timber beams and hexagonal clay tiles that cover the bathroom floor and walls, which are synonymous with the region’s traditional architecture. Sunshades and a pergola also provide some respite from the heat, allowing cool sea breezes to filter through the home. “The house is the essence of the Mediterranean,” says Torres Pujol.

In Tammisaari, an idyllic holiday town on the southern coast of Finland, the scaffolding has come down from an eye-catching new cultural building. Nestled among quaint 18th-century villas, the Chappe Art House cuts a striking figure with its angled design and black spruce façade, courtesy of Helsinki-based JKMM Architects. The three-storey venue will host regularly rotating exhibitions focused on Nordic art and was commissioned by the late genetics researcher and art collector Albert de la Chapelle (the museum’s name comes from his nickname) as a gift to the municipality.

“In the competition brief, one aim with the museum building was to make it a work of art in itself,” says Asmo Jaaksi, founding partner at JKMM Architects, a firm with a portfolio that includes the blockbuster Amos Rex museum in Helsinki. “We needed to be both humble and bold.” The architects took a traditional Tammisaari gable-roofed timber house as a starting point and gave it an asymmetric twist. Inside, gallery visitors are rewarded with sloping ceiling beams, generous natural light from two skylights and, from the top floor, impressive views over the gulf. “It doesn’t just sit there nice and quietly,” says Jaaksi. “But it doesn’t shout either.”
jkmm.fi

Brian Clarke is widely regarded as the most important creative working in stained glass today and has consistently pushed the boundaries of the medium throughout his long career. His vision for stained glass is fundamentally architectural and his portfolio includes contributions to projects by architects such as Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and Renzo Piano. His work is now on exhibition at London’s Newport Street Gallery until 24 September. Here, we ask Clarke about his craft and its evolution.

How has your work with stained glass changed over time?
One of the great challenges of the medium is making it fit in with modern architecture. Leaded glass is not a natural bedfellow with a curtain-wall skyscraper or a modernist museum. I have had the good fortune of working with some of the greatest architects of our time but the buildings that they designed were not suitable for the craft, so I had to find new ways of expressing myself in sheets of glass that could be immense in scale. That caused me to have to remove lead from the equation and develop certain new technologies.

What is the perception of stained glass in the design world?
It has changed a bit now but if you wanted to find books on stained glass in the past, you had to go to a library’s minor arts section. It has always been my intention to change that perception – stained glass is only a minor art when it’s designed by minor artists. When it’s designed by great artists, as the Middle Ages more than adequately demonstrate, it’s truly great. Its architectural essence lends it a unique quality: it’s a kinetic art that shifts and moves over the course of the day as light filters through the glass. This choreographic work across the interior spaces of buildings is a magical and mysterious aspect that is impossible for a painting to deliver.

What is the future of stained glass?
We used to make wonderful mouth-blown glass in England but that has disappeared now. It’s now an extinct art in the UK; all my glass is blown in Germany. When I began my career, it was already a dying medium – and it still is – but I like to entertain hopes and ambitions that it will survive. It can be tremendously exciting and beautiful so I remain entirely convinced that the craft has a potentially thrilling and splendid future.

To hear more from Brian Clarke, tune in to ‘Monocle On Design’ on Monocle Radio.

Danish designer Grete Jalk was ahead of her time in more ways than one. She studied furniture design and opened her own office right after the Second World War, becoming one of the few women designers in the canon of Danish modernism. In the 1950s she showed carpenter Poul Jeppesen her sketches for curved plywood furniture. The designs were so unusual that it would take seven years for them to go into production and once they did, they were a commercial dud. Today it is precisely those pieces, including this set of nesting tables from 1963, that are Jalk’s most sought-after works.

The GJ Nesting table, as this piece is known, was the accompaniment to the GJ (or Shell) chair, and served as a side table, footrest or both. Jalk had been inspired by the famous bentwood experiments of Alvar Aalto and Charles Eames but she pushed the craft to new limits: the sharp angles in the laminated plywood were so difficult to achieve that only a few hundred were ever produced. The GJ chair was reissued by WonderWood Amsterdam – and its space-saving companion deserves the same.

At its best, an Olympic torch is a sleek work of industrial design and an enduring icon of the global event that remains in people’s memories long after the sporting competition has wrapped up. It’s an ambition that the organisers of next year’s games in the French capital are looking to emulate. The design for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games Torch, which was unveiled yesterday, was conceived by Paris-based creative Mathieu Lehanneur and its striking look reflects the three themes of the event: equality, thanks to its symmetrical form; water, courtesy of its wave-like shape and rippled surface; and peacefulness via its gentle curves.

In a celebration of French craftsmanship, the torch will be produced by steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal in its facilities in Châteauneuf and Florange. The firm will use 100 per cent recycled steel to create the torch: melted steel will form its base while sheets cut from the material will be shaped to form its body. The torch’s flame will be powered by a hydrogen fuel cell that produces zero emissions – an essential feature given that the torch will embark on a long journey prior to the Games. It will be lit in Olympia, Greece, next year and then carried by 10,000 torchbearers on a 68-day trek across France and its overseas territories before finally arriving in Paris on 26 July 2024 for the opening ceremony.
mathieulehanneur.fr

The international theatre and performing arts festival, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, is returning to the Swiss city this summer, with the 44th iteration running from 17 August to 3 September. Also returning is its partnership with Studio Marcus Kraft, a Swiss graphic-design firm that has been tasked with creating a graphic and advertising campaign for the event. The work includes posters and digital media that feature graphics of hand-cast plaster panels with a single word in relief.

The design draws inspiration from the plaster objects that feature in Belgian choreographer Miet Warlop’s acclaimed performance piece, “One Song”, which will be on show as part of the festival. “I am delighted that the visual communication is so directly linked to the high-quality programme this year,” says Matthias von Hartz, Zürcher Theater Spektakel’s artistic director. It’s a link that other designers who are working with 3D and 2D mediums should also look to make. marcuskraft.com; theaterspektakel.ch