Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Reinventing Sardinia's Arts and Crafts

A few years ago, the Triennale in Milan organised an event to promote Sardinian crafts. The cultural institution is now launching a new event along the same lines that will kick off next week (from 3rd March to 21st April).

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic it will mainly take place in a digital format, via a series of webinar seminars dedicated to Sardinian artisanal companies interested in developing further themes such as authenticity and originality, cultural heritage and local production, and digital communication.

But there is also a parallel experimental cultural project - ArtiJanus/ArtiJanas - consisting in matching two Sardinian artisans with two contemporary designers.

Developed by Fondazione di Sardegna under the artistic direction of Milan's Triennale, this project will look at two sectors - ceramics and textiles - and will involve two Sardinian artisanal studios, Terrapintada and Medusa.

Founded by Simonetta Marongiu and siblings Giulia and Robert Carzedda, Terrapintada produces ceramic pieces that combine traditional techniques with modern lines and geometries.

The Medusa laboratory is based in Samugheo, a town well-known for its textile traditions and it was founded by Marcella and Daniela Sanna. The two sisters bought the equipment of a historical textile company that closed in 2004 and founded their design studio moving from their family heritage.

They now apply this ancestral knowledge and know-how to contemporary interior design pieces, but let’s hope that one day they will collaborate with a fashion designer as it would be interesting to see how their woven designs may be turned into textiles for garments or accessories.

Terrapintada and Medusa were matched with Daniele Bortotto (Zanellato/Bortotto) and Serena Confalonieri and together they will produce new pieces following three principles, functionality, artisanal techniques and innovation. The results of this unique collaboration will be showcased at the "Homo Faber" event in Venice (scheduled from 9th to 26th September, hopdefully by then we won't have too many Coronavirus restrictions...).

It will be intriguing to see which other areas will be explored in future by this collaborative project, but we're betting on wicker baskets and weaving techniques and jewellery, two crafts that may provide contemporary designers with some magnificent inspirations.  

 
 

Industrial Inspirations: Pirelli Tyres

Milan Fashion Week is currently taking place in its digital format, but the city will try to reopen next week its museums after the closures due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The city of Milan will reboot its cultural scene with the MuseoCity 2021 events, a special week dedicated to 85 museums. There is a wide range of events scheduled, from private visits to exhibitions and digital presentations (in case Lombardy becomes orange – a colour-coded alert indicating the Coronavirus risk and restrictions in place the digital events will still be taking place).

Among the events there is as usual the Secret Museum itinerary that allows visitors to discover one work of art from a museal institution, archive or collection.

The Fondazione Pirelli will be joining this special itinerary and has also launched a series of virtual events for children and grown-ups that will take digital visitors through the streets of Milan to discover the locations of the Pirelli story and its industrial architectures as well (you can join in by writing to the email [email protected]).

The institution is taking part in the Museo Segreto inviting people to rediscover black and white pictures from the Museo Storico delle Industrie Pirelli (Pirelli Industries Historical Museum).

The museum opened in 1922 in the Milan-based Pirelli-HQ at the Bicocca, the industrial heart of the city. One of the first examples of corporate or brand museums in Italy, it was opened to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company that at time was already a huge multinational with factories in Italy and abroad.

The museum displayed the products, but also presented visitors sections about the materials and the manufacturing processes, with selections of rubber trees and photographs, and highlighted the importance of graphic design in iconic adverts and catalogues. After the Second World War, the museum was dismembered and most of its displays became part of the historical archive at the Fondazione Pirelli (in Viale Piero e Alberto Pirelli 25, Milan).

How can tyres inspire us in fashion? Well, in a way they have already been an inspiration for different fashion designers: Thierry Mugler's Spring-Summer 1997 Haute Couture collection featured the iconic tyre suit in rubber and leather, made in collaboration with the designer Abel Villareal. 

Alexander McQueen S/S 1995 collection featured designs covered with tire marks (and a runway that resembled a street). The print, made by Simon Ungless, led to McQueen being accused of being a misogynist at the time, but he replied to his critics explaining "I design clothes because I do not want women to look all innocent and naive because I know what can happen to them. I want women to look stronger."

The tyre theme vaguely returned in McQueen's A/W 2009 collection with knitwear and knitted headpieces that called to mind twisted, bent and knotted tyres. So never underestimate the power of industrial materials as inspirations for a fashion collection.

Spinning a Colourful and Optimistic Yarn: Todd & Duncan S/S 22

Coronavirus disrupted the rhythms of fashion weeks, but also of fashion fairs: Pitti Filati, for example, moved onto the digisphere and yarns producers started presenting their new collections for the Spring/Summer 22 season online. The tactile pleasure that visiting a yarn fair in person may give you is lost and that’s obviously a shame, but the good thing is that some companies have tried to develop special digital sections on their sites to make sure their customers can learn more about the various yarns and their new palettes.

Todd & Duncan for example uploaded on the company’s site its digital shade cards that allow to discover more about the new fibers and colour ranges and added brief "Colour Tasting Notes", fragrant descriptions that attempt comparisons between yarns, flowers, food and artworks to help their clients visualising and imagining the intensity of the various shades and the consistency of the fibers.

Todd & Duncan's S/S 2022 collection is characterised by an optimistic title - "Abracadabra!" - an exclamation set to conjure up positive vibes and creative ideas for a season that is still so distant from us but that, we all hope, may bring us more joy and a return to normality after the disruptions and pain caused by Coronavirus. 

The Cashmere line features sixteen new versatile shades that go from an intense starflower lilac-blue to a bright pink.

The Eri Silk and Calathea Naturals blend instead silk and linen, symbolising the lightness of summer through these fibers and with this series of undyed yarns.

The Eri Silk Naturals, taking the name from the "red eri" silk produced by silkworms fed on Ficus Citrifolia leaf, are characterised by a fine shantung effect; the Calathea Naturals line features instead yarns made with a blend of linen and undyed cashmere, with its linen yarn grown from heritage seed, and has zero chemical processes applied throughout production. 

Todd & Duncan has been working on sustainability (and on biodegradable cashmere yarns) for a few years now and for the S/S 22 season the company is launching the Goose Cashmere line.

The name comes from Todd & Duncan's location on Loch Leven, where the renowned nature reserve is home to tens of thousands of migratory pink footed geese and many other bird species. This line is made with a repurposed 100% cashmere twisted yarn, using second line cashmere colours re-imagined in a mid-gauge weight yarn produced in a full range of colourful marls in contrasting shades. 

The inspirations behind this collection are particularly intriguing as they go from art and architecture to nature: Samuel Zeller's book "Botanical" was one of the starting points together with the glasshouses at Edinburgh Royal Botanic. These architectural structures with flowers and leaves pressed against the glass to create textural shapes, forms, patterns and colours, lend a sense of quietness and tranquillity, of regained serenity and optimism for the future.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's studies of wild plants and flowers also provided ideas for delicate yarns in energetic shades: the muted green "Willow" shade was inspired by Mackintosh's Willow Tearooms, while a pretty fresh pink was borrowed from a pencil and watercolour drawing of the Sea Pink flower (Armeria maritima) by Mackintosh. The drawing was made in 1901 when Mackintosh was visiting Holy Island, on the north east coast of England. 

Last but not least, Ben McLaughlin's collages also provided some key inspirations: the bold relief works made through layering and placing cut-out shapes of reused card and paper were indeed an endless resource of ideas for Todd & Duncan's colours and yarns.

Tailored by Weather: Marinero by Studio Adaptive Skins

Last week we looked at sustainable projects that may change the fashion industry and provide innovative ideas when it comes to the design and manufacturing stages. Fashion Scout presented during the latest edition of London Fashion Week (that was mostly digital due to the Coronavirus pandemic), a project by Studio Adaptive Skins that explores these themes.

This textile architecture studio based in Arnhem, The Netherlands, was founded in 2018 by Jef Montes who has a passion for responsive materials.

Since founding his studio, rather than thinking merely about fashion design, Montes started developing yarns and textiles before moving onto the actual garments.

In 2019 Studio Adaptive Skins joined the Re-FREAM network, a project aimed at rethinking the production process of fashion. In this context Montes developed the main concept for a unique collection entitled "Tailored by Weather".

The main idea was creating adaptive yarns with unique mechanical components that allowed the smart filaments to change their shape and deform when exposed to weather conditions, a concept inspired by biomimicry and the possibility of turning 2D elemental forms into complex 3D shapes.

Montes developed a research with the Aitex Material Technology Institute in Alcoy/Valencia and the Wood K Plus research institute, at the Johannes Kepler Institute in Linz.

Experiments about recycling plastic from the sea (rPET, and also PLA bioplastics), melt coating and dip coating production processes were carried out to create the Adaptive Archi-Filament.

Montes' project partners then collaborated with Empa, the federal material science laboratories in St. Gallen, that helped lab testing and sharing valuable yarn improvement information and the first high performing filament prototypes were developed at the TextielLab in Tilburg, The Netherlands.

The result was the "Marinero" collection, consisting in a series of variations on the same theme: the simple tunic-like dresses are produced with one woven square created with unique yarns such as the Adaptive Archi-Filament A+B (designed by Jef Montes & produced in collaboration with Aitex and Wood K Plus); Rpet (recycled plastic waste from the sea); PLA (Bioplastic) and seacell silk yarns dyed with algae pigment. All woven and knitted materials were produced at the TextielLab.

The garments were then displayed on dummies and left under rain, heavy wind and drought on the rooftop of a chemistry laboratory. The weather conditions sculpted and moulded the pieces, radically transforming them.

Some dramatically shrunk, others expanded in certain areas, deformed, and mutated their shape. Horizontally woven and vertical nylon filaments were distorted showing a new flexibility and infinite variations. It was an organic and unpredictable process, reminiscent in a way of early experiments such as Hussein Chalayan's graduate collection (1993) made with fabric the designer buried in a friend’s garden with some rusted iron pieces. 

In that case Chalayan explored the concepts of change and decay, while in this project Montes plays with the possibility of continuously transforming the same garment. Yet there is something similar between the two designers: both went through a long process to get the desired results.

The experiments for Montes' designs lasted 6 months and the designer acted like a scientist, taking pictures, writing reports on the samples, observing and recording the changes that he then proceeded to publish as an open source research on his site. The main purpose behind "Marinero" is creating a collection of garments that adapt and grow with the wearer.

Coronavirus didn't stop Montes' research: the pandemic actually prompted him to realise that change is needed in the industry as soon as possible and pushed him to go forward in his researches about innovative and sustainable materials to pursue positive changes.

But there’s more behind this project: the final goal for Montes is to offer the Adaptive Archi-Filament as a commercial product in 2022. This material may prove useful not just for fashion designers but for interior designers as well, as proved by the "Marinero" lamp that Montes has designed and that is already available to buy from Studio Adaptive Skins' store. 

Antique Textiles Inspirations

In the last few posts we looked at innovative systems to make garments, but also at recycling textiles. So let’s restart the week from there with a couple of brief inspirations – the first picture refers to the Korean bojagi or pojagi, a traditional Korean wrapping cloth.

Made from a variety of materials, including silk, this traditionally square cloth can also be made with patchworked or scrapped materials. In this case it is known as min-bo or chogak bo, and it is made with small segments ("chogak") of fabric, such as those left over from cutting the curves in traditional hanbok clothing.

These textiles were mainly employed to cover food, wrap gift in weddings or in Buddhist rites, as traditional Korean folk religions believed that keeping something wrapped brought good luck.

More recently, these textiles have been recognized as a traditional art form and were often featured in museums: the Museum of Korean Embroidery in Seoul has a collection of 1,500 pieces of bojagi, with a particular focus on chogak bo.

The first three images in this post refer to a bojagi available to buy on the Tatami Antiques site, an independent online marketplace for Japanese antiquities that often offers intriguing textile pieces and ideas for fashion designers. 

This patchworked hemp bojagi is sold by the antique dealer kikue, but if you prefer Japanese pieces such as kimono fabrics and textiles, check out this obi sash from the Showa period (early 20th century; sold by antique dealer Jinta). This is a peculiar piece because it incorporates a series of obi sashes stitched together and may be used as a unique fashion accessory or an interior design piece.  

From Boro to Modern Recycling & Upcycling

In yesterday's post we looked at the technicalities behind new sustainable systems for fashion manufacturing; let's continue that thread today, but look at how a Japanese company is working on the sustainability issue.

Inspired by "Boro", that is a style of Japanese textiles mended or patched together, Japanese brand Edwin recently released "The Traveller's Denim".

This limited collection of denim pants incorporates sections of authentic Japanese travel pennants dating back to the '60s-'80s (the Showa Era of Japan). Each pennant used features images from different prefectures and famous sites around Japan.

The triangular pennants became popular in those years and people collected them as they represented physical mementos of a special trip, but nowadays such souvenirs have lost their charm as most of us prefer to take quick digital pictures with cameras and smartphones and share them on social media as souvenirs of our trips.

In addition to the distinctive pennants, the designs are also individually enhanced with stitching applied by hand or using sewing machines in a style reminiscent of sashiko stitching, a quilting technique consisting in a running stitch used to impart warmth and strength to garments. 

The main concept behind these designs is recycling textiles and upcycling them, while offering consumers a sort of souvenir, as some people may want to try and get a pair of jeans featuring a place that they may have visited in Japan. As the Coronavirus pandemic halted travelling, the collaged pennants are also intended as symbols of the freedom we have lost, but we hope to regain as soon as possible. 

Edwin also worked with Reyn Spooner, the famous manufacturer of Hawaiian shirts, founded in 1961 by menswear shop manager Reynolds McCullough (known as "Reyn") and seamstress Ruth Spooner. Edwin employed rayon deadstock fabric exclusively produced for Reyn Spooner between 1994 to 2007 and reused it for a a collaborative collection of shirts.

The company also developed an educational project: 400 denim pants by Edwin which were scheduled to be discarded were recycled and employed by students of the Bunka Fashion College to create new pieces currently on display at Edwin Tokyo Harajuku. The projects will be on display till next Sunday.

Another Fashion Story is Possible: "Zero Waste Systems Thinking: Multimorphic Textile-Forms" by Holly McQuillan

Coronavirus has reshaped the fashion runways but it has also prompted many to realise that the industry needs a completely new frame of mind to survive and must also be reinvented if we want our planet to thrive rather than perish. But, while maybe most of us realised this only in the last twelve months as Coronavirus turned into a global emergency, there have been researchers who have focused for years on finding new ways to develop innovative systems to change the fashion industry.

Among them there is Holly McQuillan who, as you may remember, we mentioned in yesterday's post in connection with Liam Young's film "Planet City". McQuillan made in collaboration with Karin Peterson and Kathryn Walters some of the costumes for Liam Young's project, but she is also the founder of the Zero Waste Design Online International collective and has been working on a PhD dissertation on the topic.

The dissertation, entitled "Zero Waste Systems Thinking: Multimorphic Textile-Forms", is available to download at this link, and it is an itnriguing read not just for fashion designers, but for pattern cutters and textiles designers and owners of manufacturing plants as well.

In the 630-page tome McQuillan analyses how the fashion industry may be able respond to the environmental crisis. As McQuillan explains in the book, cut-and-sew is the most common method of garment construction used in industry, but it can also be exploitative, time-consuming and wasteful. Questioning how technology can further shape form-making, McQuillan looked at Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara's A-POC system, but also at recent explorations on whole garment weaving by Anna Piper, Jacqueline Lefferts, and Claire Harvey.

After developing sketches and mock up paper maquettes, McQuillan moved onto experimenting with a variety of prototyping methods. In the central part of the book she therefore proceeds to present us with some of the results of her prototyping processes, with a series of technical developments, textile studies and experiments aimed at expanding the form-design methods available for whole garment weaving in the context of zero waste system design. McQuillan looks at a series of different garments, including coats, T-shirts, trousers and gowns. 

The initial group of experiments explore how to digitally apply ideas of controlling the behaviour of textiles and using 3D fashion design software program CLO3D to visualize the expression of these concepts. As the research progresses, McQuillan introduces zero waste pattern cutting for flat and woven textile-forms and intriguing studies about weave bindings for multi-layered textiles, heat-reactive yarns and moulding.

Some of these techniques like the one about the creation of fitted areas in combination with expansive fullness may be used for refined Haute Couture garments (McQuillan employs it in her dissertation to construct a gown with a fitted bodice and a full-flared skirt), but also for visually striking costumes.

McQuillan applied for example a few of these processes to the costumes for Liam Young's "Planet City" that are explored in the final part of the volume in great detail. The dissertation allows us therefore to look at the work that went into the designs for the Zero Waste Weavers and the Algae Divers and discover how McQuillan combined colour and surface pattern interacting with form-making processes or how she used heat reactive yarns to manipulate form and surface texture.

There is not a real conclusion to this book and actually there shouldn't be: McQuillan proposes us methods that may not fix fashion forever but that may introduce more radical changes to the fashion system (McQuillan also posts her experiments - such as the processes for embedding 3D form and detail into an apparently 2D textile - on her Instagram page which is definitely worth following).

As a whole this is a mind-expanding and thought-provoking research, a volume recommended to architects as well as it looks at principles such as density, stability and flexibility and at new design systems (interior designers may also benefit from McQuillan's researches as they can inspire us to think about how to recycle textiles employed for interior pieces). So, let's leave fashion shows and digital fashion weeks behind and go back to study and research more to genuinely understand how manufacturing garments may change in future.

Ode to the Hyper-Dense Mega-Metropolis: "Planet City" by Liam Young @ The National Gallery of Victoria Triennial

Architects and designers often try to imagine what the city of the future will look like. Australian film director and speculative architect Liam Young tried to present his vision in a 15-minute animated short film.

Entitled "Planet City", the film takes us to a hyper-dense sustainable vertical city where 10 billion humans - the projected population of the earth in 2050 - live.

This is the place where humanity has decided to retreat while nature takes back its spaces and returns to thrive, reversing in this way the apocalyptic climate change.

In this mega-metropolis people live in towering conglomerates of houses or skyscrapers made from recycled materials, some of them are 165 storeys tall and they are powered with renewable energy sources (there are 49,445,671,570 solar panels in the city). Food is grown in vertical orchards and indoor mega-farms and 2,357 algae farms filter pollution and provide supplementary food.

A non-stop planetary festival, a 365-day procession, moves through the city, combining together important celebrations held by different cultures throughout the year.

Young also presented some of the inhabitants of this city and collaborated with very special costume designers to develop their wardrobes.

Costume artists Holly McQuillian, Karin Peterson and Kathryn Walters made the costumes for the Zero Waste Weavers, a group of inhabitants who wear long woven robes and trousers almost fully constructed on a loom and crocheted masks that seem assembled from a variety of leftover yarns.

Aneesa Shami designed the costume for the High Altitude Bot Herder, a shaman-like figure wearing trousers made of textile scraps and a horned headdress, while Courtney Mitchell made the Beekeeper costume that combines Oriental moods, the extravagance of Haute Couture and functional and protective wear.

Among the collaborators for this project there are also The Handmaid's Tale costume designer, Ane Crabtree, who acted as film producer and costume director, and architectural fashion designer Yeohlee Teng.

Crabtree co-ordinated the work on the costumes for the Nomadic Worker (a blue uniform inspired by Oriental garments with a headdress similar to the vintage helmets of Japanese firefighters - remember that ensemble by Kansai Yamamoto with a red headdress?), the Algae Divers, dressed in ample designs made according to a strict zero waste principle developed by Holly McQuillian, Karin Peterson, Kathryn Walters, and the Drone Shepherd, a character wearing a buffalo headdress, a reference to spirit animal powers.

Yeohlee Teng designed the costume for the Code Talker, inspired by morse code and Teng's Resort 19 collection with a headdress reminiscent of a porcupine. 

Young crosses cultures, disciplines and traditional divides through his films and previously developed other projects that featured futuristic costumes: in "Where the City Can't See", a narrative fiction film captured entirely with laser scanners and shot with the same scanning technologies used by autonomous vehicles, Young told the story of a group of car factory workers who at night, adorned in machine vision camouflage and anti-facial recognition masks, try to escape the city by hacking it and searching for a place they know exists but that their car doesn't recognize.

These characters wear a series of LIDAR scanner camouflage costumes made with algorithmic textile patterns developed on computerized silk looms. The costumes create glitches and distortions when captured using the laser scanning technology that driverless cars use to navigate and map the world. The reflective silk and synthetic threads scatter laser light and render the body as a distortion within the data set.

Though speculative, Young's "Planet City" is based on real calculations and research: the director collaborated indeed with scientists, theorists, economists and even a NASA microbiologist (designing closed-loop waste systems for the future of Mars colonies) to develop it.

For this film Young was inspired by the concept developed by biologist E.O. Wilson in his essay "Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life" which proposes that mass extinction can be averted by dedicating half of the surface of the earth to nature. According to Young, "Planet City" could actually occupy as little as 0.02% of the earth, roughly the size of an average US state. The project is also conceived as a provocation that, Young hopes, may prompt debates and discussions not just about the environment, but about citizenship and national identities, something that would be abolished by the multiplicity of cultures living together in the same city.

Conceived as a work of critical architecture rather than just techno-utopian fantasy with the allure of a video game, "Planet City" was commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for the NGV Triennial 2020. 

The Planet City project is accompanied by a book edited by Andrew Mackenzie, with Charles Rice and Mark Campbell, featuring original short stories set within the city by Kim Stanley Robinson, Qifan Chen, Nalo Hopkinson, Ryan Griffen and XIA JIA and original non-fiction essays by Benjamin Bratton, Holly Gene Buck, Saskia Sassen, Ashley Dawson, Giorgos Kallis, Ewan McEoin, Amaia Sanchez-Velasco and Andrew Toland. The book is available for international shipping from the NGV Bookshop. 

PLANET CITY_EXCERPT from liam young on Vimeo.

Non-Narrative Graphics in Space: Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze's "How To be Enough" @ Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia

There are artists who love to fill their canvases with colours, objects, people and patterns. Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze prefers instead to create on paper large-scaled scenes characterized by minimal settings and inspired by photography, architecture and print-making.

Born in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria, but currently based in Philadelphia, Amanze has a passion for breaking a scene into units: in one of her drawings there there may be an architectural feature such as a window in the distance, a hybrid creature like her leopard man Audre in the foreground and then geometries created by angular swimming pools and divers. The way the artist puts together her compositions allows her to create an infinite setting on a fluid space on which her flat figures move. The weightlessness of her figures is also symbolised by the material employed by the artist - paper.

Amanze creates scenes using graphite, ink and pigment drawings that she often combines with photo transfers, in some cases inspired by the art of the late Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, and that at times seem slightly reminiscent of Superstudio's collages (in this case there was usually a grid as a background, while in Amanze's we have a neutral white background).

The stories Amanze tells do not have a cohesive narrative: quite often they are visual studies in which the artist plays with space, graphic patterns, architecture, dance (she is also a dancer) and fashion.

The graphic patterns employed by Amanze derive indeed from her interests and studies in textiles: it is not rare to spot in one of her works a character wearing a visually striking garment such as a striped gown or a pair of trousers with an intricate pattern.

Amanze has recently created a new drawing for the Pattern Room at Collezione Maramotti. This new work, entitled "How To Be Enough", consists in 15 large sheets of paper that create a modern minimalist fresco featuring divers, a pink grid-like window and a statuesque dancer, on thick rag paper, a sculptural and structural medium. The fresco will also become the background for one of her performances at the Collezione Maramotti in June 2021.

Visitors will be able to see the new work from 21st February (to 25th July) at the Collezione Maramotti (Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia), but on Saturday 20th February (at 6pm CET), you have the chance to join in a conversation with the artist at this link. 

During this event it will be possible to ask the artist questions using the live chat on YouTube or you can send your questions in beforehand (deadline to send the questions: 3.00pm CET on Saturday 20th February) via email at [email protected], or via private message on Collezione Maramotti's Facebook and Instagram pages.

 Amanze is one of those contemporary artists who may easily appeal to fashion designers: you look at her bright and bold figures floating in neutral spaces and you can immeditely imagine them printed on a T-shirt or a dress. So get this chance to ask Amanze some questions before a fashion designer asks her to collaborate on their next collection: you'll be able to say you were aware of her works way before the fashion industry spotted her.

Book Preview + Kickstarter Campaign: The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn (Designers and Books)

It is always immensely exciting to do a follow up about a project we mentioned in a previous post since we can check its progress and see how it's doing.

Today we announce for example that the Kickstarter campaign for the reissue of Richard Saul Wurman's The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn (published by artisanal and independent publisher Designers and Books) has finally gone live.

As you may remember from a previous post The Notebooks (you can check a preview here) were originally published in 1962 by Richard Saul Wurman (a colleague and friend of architect Louis I. Kahn's and founder of the TED conference) and printer Eugene Feldman, under the Falcon Press imprint.

The volume (re-released in 1973 by MIT Press) included a section of travel sketches from the 1950s depicting sites in Greece, Egypt, Italy, and France that reflected Kahn's interest in monumental forms, plus a part featuring Kahn's early drawings and renderings for, among other well-known projects, the sculpture court of the Yale University Art Gallery; the A.N. Richards Medical Research Building (Laboratory), at the University of Pennsylvania; the General Motors Exhibition Building for the 1964 New York World's Fair; and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, California.

Wurman selected the drawings included in the book, choosing not what he personally liked, but the ones that reflected his passion and  his spirit. As Wurman states today, "I didn't choose what were considered his best, most finished drawings. I chose those that spoke to me - much in the same way that Lou would say you had a conversation with the building...the drawings that told me what they were trying to be."

Kahn's son Nathaniel, director of the Academy Award-nominated film "My Architect: A Son's Journey," says about The Notebooks that "it was the first book devoted to my father's art, and he loved it." 

The Facsimile is an exact copy of the 1973 edition and it recreates a sort of symmetry in publishing: the volume is indeed accompanied by an all-new Reader's Guide with extensive archival information, previously unpublished drawings by Kahn and essays from new writings by a variety of critics and colleagues, including Wurman, Louis Kahn’s three children - Nathaniel Kahn, Sue Ann Kahn, and Alexandra Tyng; critic Paul Goldberger, Peter Reed (formerly of MoMA), Norman Foster, and Tadao Ando among others. 

While architects, designers and passionate Kahn fans will obviously be interested in this publication, fashion designers who like to reference architecture in their collections should also grab a copy as it would help them developing original inspirations for their designs.

Kahn displayed a gift for drawing from an early age, but his parents were too poor to buy art materials, so he improvised and sketched with burnt twigs and matches. He favored the quality of the charcoal line so much that even after he had become a celebrated architect he continued at times to draw with burnt matches.

Kahn's style was also characterized by a deep sense of history and pure geometry in design and the texture of materials used in construction, notably concrete and brick. So his legacy - this passion for humble materials that he used to sketch, pure geometries and textures - may provide fashion designers with some intriguing inspirations (without mentioning the fact that some of these sketches could be easily printed on minimalist designs for maximum effect - what about a concrete grey or ivory summer dress with Kahn's sketches from his trips to Europe?)

You can get your copy and enjoy some of the limited time discounts for early supporters on the Kickstarter campaign page and remember that there will be special rewards for those Kahn fans who may invest in the project $850 or more: rewards in this case include a private live virtual tour of the Louis I. Kahn Collection conducted by William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager of the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania; a virtual tour of Kahn Korman House given by Larry Korman, owner of the last house Louis Kahn designed (1973, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania), and a private virtual screening of "My Architect, A Son's Journey", with a Q&A session with Nathaniel Kahn.

The Facsimile and the Reader's Guide will be published following the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign, but it looks like the campaign is progressing pretty well: Designers & Books has so far launched other successful Kickstarter campaigns such as the one for the book Depero Futurista (The Bolted Book) by Fortunato Depero, and at the time of writing this post the Louis Kahn Kickstarter campaign has already hit over €14,000. The Facsimile and Reader's Guide are scheduled to be printed in Summer 2021 and the volumes and the rewards will ship in November 2021, so just in time for a very architectural Christmas.

Image credits for this post

All images from The Louis I. Kahn Facsimile Project

1. Front cover

2, 3, 4, 5. Four-page letter from Louis I. Kahn to Richard Saul Wurman and Eugene Feldman (included in 1973 edition of Notebooks and Drawings)

6. 1951 Luxor, Egypt, crayon in notebook

7. 1951 Delphi from Marmaria, Greece, crayon in notebook

8. 1950 Doges’ [Doge’s] Palace, Venice, Italy, crayon in notebook

9. The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn 2021 Kickstarter project image