The Monocle Minute
On Design

How do we clear the air in a car-choked concrete jungle? A new park in London’s Elephant & Castle provides a blueprint (or rather, a greenprint). Then we take a dip in Lake Como Design Festival and ready ourselves for the reissue of Kaare Klint’s iconic Spherical Bed. Plus: we meet the woman at the creative helm of Finnish heritage brand littala. Here to kick things off, Nic Monisse considers why Geneva is steering away from urban-planning specialists.

The busy junction at the heart of London’s Elephant & Castle neighbourhood is the epitome of a concrete, car-centric mess. But adjacent to this intersection, the newly revitalised Elephant Park is providing a much-needed moment of calm. When international design firm Gillespies started work on the project a decade ago, the green space was surrounded by building sites, says Giacomo Guzzon, the practice’s head of planting. “At night, a gate would be locked to stop people from entering.” Now there’s no gate, a sign that the designers have fulfilled their ambition to add permeability to the area’s urban fabric. “We wanted to allow people to easily walk across the park, to access the shops and restaurants at the bottoms of the tower blocks that front onto it.”

Highlights of the green space include verdant planting that abuts the adjacent cafés and a playground and water-play area that’s a hit with local children. Despite the space’s popularity, its effect is instantly calming. “In the evenings, when the kids are gone, it’s soothing to hear the sounds of the water,” says Guzzon. Office workers can often be spotted dipping their bare feet into the water. This flow of people of all ages and walks of life is a big part of the site’s success. Guzzon puts this down to the abundance of opportunities for interaction, whether at the café or on the playground. “It’s key to creating lively cities.”
gillespies.co.uk

For more projects like Elephant Park, pick up a copy ofMonocle’s October issue, on newsstands tomorrow.

As creative disciplines, graphic and print work can often feel disparate from the likes of furniture design and architecture. It’s something that publisher Lithos addressed at the recent Lake Como Design Festival with its Lightness on Paper exhibition. Here, the Como-based outfit, which was established in 1989, sought to respond to the event’s theme of “lightness” by commissioning a host of designers to produce bespoke pieces using ancient engraving methods.

The resulting exhibition is a collection of graphic explorations in the deconsecrated San Pietro in Atrio church. The prints, created using techniques ranging from etching to lithography, saw the likes of Mario Botta and Michele De Lucchi create impressive one-off commissions. The showcase highlighted that stunning works can be created when architects and furniture-makers transpose their processes to other disciplines.
edizionilithos.it; lakecomodesignfestival.com

Since 1881, littala has been a pioneering force in artistic and artisanal glassmaking. It’s a legacy that the Finnish heritage brand is continuing under the creative direction of Janni Vepsäläinen. After working abroad and in fashion for more than a decade (most recently as London-based JW Anderson’s senior knitwear designer), Vepsäläinen returned to Helsinki, trading knitting machines for glassware kilns. She is looking to imbue Iittala with renewed creative energy, bridging the gap between respecting the past and innovation. We caught up with Vepsäläinen for a recent live recording of Monocle On Design at Helsinki’s Alvar Aalto-designed House of Culture.

As a creative director, tell us about your relationship with Iittala’s craftspeople. How closely do you work together?
The glass factory is about an hour’s drive from Helsinki. I’m there every other week and my visits are really about experimentation, ideation and innovation. We have dedicated time with the glassblowers when we are completely free and working together to make different and unexpected things. Some ideas are a success and others are not but that’s all part of the process. We have some iconic designs in our portfolio and they were all born from this same spirit of innovation and exploration. That, to me, is why it’s essential to encourage creativity and dream up wild ideas.

How do you strike the balance between respecting heritage and innovating?
As a designer, I’ve always been very interested in this balance between the past and the present. A lot of brands would envy Iittala’s 143-year history because once you have a story, it’s always yours. You can’t just create a heritage out of nowhere. This means that at Iittala it feels like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. This could be intimidating but when I look at someone like Tapio Wirkkala, who created hundreds of glassware designs, I remember that there’s so much of his work that remains relatively unknown. So, when I get stuck, I look back to that, knowing that he probably had tough days but then overcame them. To me, that’s an encouraging history to be a part of.

How do you bring the past into the present at Iittala?
It’s really about putting creativity at the core of everything and not sacrificing or making compromises. It’s also about teamwork, especially when it comes to glassblowing. To build something lasting, you need room to work and time.

For more on littala, tune in to our special episode of ‘Monocle On Design’ featuring Janni Vepsäläinen.

Nordic designers often know best when it comes to crafting lamps to illuminate the long nights of autumn and winter. By now, luminaires by the likes of Arne Jacobsen and Paavo Tynell are so in demand that original pieces go for eye-watering prices. Fortunately, beyond the headline names there’s an abundant supply of lesser-known 1950s manufacturers that can still, with some luck, be found for bargains at auctions. One designer that merits attention is Hans-Agne Jakobsson, whose namesake factory produced thousands of lights in the small town of Markaryd in southern Sweden.

Jakobsson trained as a cabinetmaker and worked at a lighting company before moving to Markaryd to start out on his own. He was a pragmatic designer and businessman: the first catalogue, produced with his wife, was entitled “Vettiga Varor” (Sensible Goods). Lights became his speciality and he made all sorts, from art deco-fringed chandeliers to streamlined modernist pieces. Some of the best are the ones crafted from wood and lacquered metal, such as the Model 572 floor lamp. With an adjustable shade giving out a warm glow, it’s exactly what should stand next to an armchair on a gloomy evening.

Danish furniture manufacturer Carl Hansen & Søn is reissuing a work by the influential modernist architect and designer Kaare Klint. The Spherical Bed, created in 1938, was a single bed with mirrored, rounding edges. The precision of its symmetry was considered a mathematical phenomenon at a time of no digital aid. “His works are incredibly complex, which means that most of them do not lend themselves to serial production,” says Knud Erik Hansen, CEO of Carl Hansen & Søn. “However, we have a real desire to continue Klint’s legacy and to explore one of Danish design’s most famous profiles.”

The bed’s rerelease, which is made on demand and now available as a double, is milled entirely from a singular tree trunk. Its careful production is a six-weeks-long process resulting in a piece with pleasing consistency of tone and grain throughout its exposed wood surfaces. This bed is a piece of Danish design history – and a great head start on a good night’s sleep.
carlhansen.com

Late architectural theorist and professor Detlef Mertins dedicated years of his life to understanding the work of German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Now, Phaidon is reissuing his findings in a comprehensive book, Mies, which offers a complete overview of his career that spanned two continents, two world wars and two cities: Berlin and Chicago. Across the pages, some 700 photographs, plans, diagrams and paintings have been gathered to illustrate the influential architect’s worldview.

“Mies reinterprets the symbolic role of sacred architecture for a secular society,” says Mertins in the book’s introduction. As such, Mies invites readers into a world of deep reflection on philosophy, art, design and science – topics that influenced the architect and shaped him into one of the most celebrated designers of the 20th century.
phaidon.com