Part II Design & Antidesign

Parallel with this, stained-glass artists establish their own workshops; lacking religious commissions and by the terror of thermopane and the change of style in architecture and interior design, they worked on their own collection by designing flat glass detached from ‘the hole in the wall’ and developing new applications. Glass in Architecture and Flat Glass became the disciplines for the monumental ideas. At the academies, the glass departments were being closed down but in Belgium the stained glass and leaded glass techniques continued to exist, with hardly any new views, however.

Together with brown and white goods all modernities had to be designed: telephones, radios and television sets, furniture and means of transport inspired designers: Sottsass worked for Olivetti, Alberto Alessi designed kitchenware and Philippe Starck furniture, while the crafts kept following the retro styles such as Art Nouveau and Liberty and the Postmodernists were the rebels with Antidesign and Radical Design, bringing the Cult of Ugliness. Good Taste turned into Bad Taste with them. They opposed Modernism, Neomodernism and the void High Tech Design.
Retro-, Post- and Neo-styles with concepts of Punk Design, Bauhaus Baroque and Barokoko, with groups like Memphis, Alchimea and Alter Ego fought for a place in the galleries, museums and collections which made the avant-garde the rearguard by investing in a new Design vocabulary.

In 1985 design got a high level of cuddliness. With tactile qualities, complex use of materials, colours and techniques Biomorphism took the lead. As a sharp contrast architecture used Rationalism with new construction possibilities like safety and insulating glass; reflecting façades made the coloured mirror palaces possible in pink, bleu, green, brown and black. It was energy efficient but the people in the buildings noticed that part of the normal daylight was being reflected away. Together with the air conditioning this phenomenon caused the Sick Building Syndrome and a response from the architects who were going to design people-friendly buildings in which also the material usage was in line with the High Touch Style and post-modern movements which gave rituals and myths a place again like within the arts where Myths & Rites was a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Zurich. Green Design attracted attention by advocating non-aerosol spray cans, biodegradable plastics, refrigerators without CFCs and reuse of materials, whereupon the first bottle bank in the Netherlands was placed in ’s-Hertogenbosch on 17 May 1978. Maltha Hollow Glass and Maltha Flat Glass are among the largest firms collecting used glass, www.maltha.nl.

Meanwhile, the stained-glass artists developed modern working methods, processing large sheets of float glass and looking for new uses for glass in architecture. For this they built larger studios as well as larger furnaces so that also silk-screen printing, embedding materials in the insulating glass cavity and in safety glass foils became possible. When the new products were developed, they came back to the glass industry to make their work applicable on a larger scale.

All hot glass techniques become available so the artist is more in control of shape, colour and size of the glass object.
In 1986 the Instituut voor Kunstambachten in Mechelen opens its Glass department.
In America, new ideas emerged of Narrative Architecture and Deconstructivism. Narrative architecture is mainly about the location and architecture uses it to design. Deconstruction comes from the graphic arts from pasting and cutting and is considered as Antidesign as it cuts across the constructivists, as one can see in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 1990 New Design showed up, the designer as a universalist: specialized craftsmen and architects take up their own production, sales and public relations as the new entrepreneurs and build new, flexible industries and produce small series and can respond quickly. The latest trend is the high technology cottage industry: the American Charles Sabel, historical economist, describes with this concept the cooperation between small workshops and studios making parts for one another or for larger companies. With their advanced technology and specialization, they can quickly respond to a demand, and they are still the innovators of today’s industry. Alongside these designers are the highly developed technical designers who for instance design, manufacture and build visible structures with glass.

More and more industry and craft are paralleling each other.
Among the artists are, end of 1996, applied artists who create autonomous, visual art objects with a fictitious practical function or even visual design. Their practical art is integrated in ‘real’ life.
By Kitsch and Camp, art and design become a parody of the art whose aesthetic mingles with the popular arts. Architecture becomes Fun Architecture, not attractive to the avant-garde but to the users of the building. Supermodernism becomes the counter reaction where the denial of place, context and a cultural, philosophical identity lead to super-neutral buildings whose façades do not give away what is going on inside. Glass wall curtains conceal the building structure, windows and doors. The McDonalds, Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola culture in commercial construction boosts consumption. Life speeds up by the digital technology and the globalization is steaming ahead. New Neurotic Realism is next to the virtual of the computer world. High and low culture mix with advertising and computer games and translate design into personal and emotional; and pop art, trash art, porn aesthetic show the body as a commodity: Shock Art as proof that we live.
Design awards and the designer as a superstar are becoming trendy: Innovative Design Prizes of the Design Centre Essen; the Design Preis für Gestaltung of the Heim+Handwerk Fair in Munich, the Design Preis Schweiz; the Henry van de Velden Prizes of Design Flanders in Brussels, the Design Prize Rotterdam: all are in search of what design could be. Just before the turn of the century design is identity, prestige and image. Even a Business-to-Business mail order Design Catalogue provides fun-design for every home and business.

In the meantime architects, artists, couturiers, glass artists and designers work for Royal Leerdam and with Saint-Gobain, Pilkington and other big glass industries. Glass is gradually growing to maturity, but the industry is hard to keep up with: Bio-clean glass, glass radiators, fire-resistant glass, Smart glass that cleans itself, optically active glass, Super glass, transparent insulation materials and gels, new lighting systems with LEDs such as Power Glass, solar energy panels, translucent concrete, water-jet cutting machines, laser cutting machines, car windows with embedded radio antennas and heating offering route guidance and UV protection, increasingly larger float glass sheets and revolutionary studies such as Zappi by prof.dr.ing. Mick Eekhout and the Delft University of Technology to make glass as strong as metal. In the early years of the 21^st century, the Royal Saint-Gobain Glassworks in Sas van Gent started the architectural program for the factory-scale printing and embossing, culminating, for the moment, in the Media Building in Hilversum with a façade designed by Jaap Drupsteen. And now new developments designed by Barbara Nanning, Jan-Willem van Zijst, Wiel Arets and Marijke de Goey see the light of day. After 2006 follows on a smaller scale the technology for digital printing of flat glass with Drop-on-demand print heads printing the motif and the ink being burned and processed into safety glass and toughened glass.

Meanwhile Droog Design, Moooi, Studio Job, Dutch by Design, Dezeen, the Premsela Foundation or Yksi stand for Dutch Design, sometimes serving the function, sometimes explicitly as artists searching for autonomous design or visual design. The success of the vases Hella Jongerius designed for Ikea was a harbinger of the hype that design is: the Designhouse in Eindhoven was opened in 2007 and celebrated in 2008 the 60th anniversary of what is now called the Design Academy Eindhoven. Together with the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven a breeding ground for new products of which commerce, the desperately status-seeking ‘new rich’ and retired consumers decide which designer is hip now: Open Design: DIY Design, Crowdsourcing, Making and Craft design.

In the meantime we are in terms of control and patronizing almost back to square one. By the power of the free market system with ‘the big grab’, the loss of acquired social rights, the lamentably poor education and the eco-terror trying to impose some restraints on our unlimited consuming but replacing it with new nonsense, the state has a grasp of the comings and goings of The Glass Man by global control of our digital footprints. Intelligent energy and water meters, navigation and payment systems in the car and the intelligent car itself which is driving for us and the intelligent television set will in the near future acquire information about our comings and goings and interactively define our application and payment possibilities. By the globalization of world-wide finance and trade our own production is decreasing and we have become a service economy with flexible workers while at the same time Chinese child slaves are putting our fully developed products together and in India those with no future are scrapping our digital waste – for which we neatly paid eco-tax – in appalling conditions. Meanwhile we are working on knowledge centres to develop cutting edge technology with high-tech products for the future.

And just when the Dutch ‘Die-zijners die waren’ (≈ Those who are, are passé) are back and the Orange Alert wanders over the world, we receive Philippe Starck’s reaction declaring design as nonsense and announcing that he will not design anymore as of next year. He is one of the few designers who feel that if design does not even solve all those issues, it is just merchandise. The fact that designers could take their responsibility, Ben Verwaayen explained in a radio discussion about him leaving British Telecom on the radio programme De Ochtenden aan Tafel. Would the Fair Trade label on our design and glass products which were made in Third World countries, not be to our credit? The Wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade#Definition_of_fair_trade gives the definition and conditions.

Arise, you wretched of the earth!

And then here is the third edition of Glass is more! Because apart from that we have realized one of the better exhibitions both in 2009 and in 2010, Engelbert Roovers and I like to honour the anarchistic character of the building De Machinekamer (The Engine Room) and our presentation as a laboratory for glass design, antidesign, or if you prefer: over-all-borders design, product design, visual design, open design, DIY design, Industrial Craft, New Craft, gebruikskunstwerk, hybride design, art with intrinsic design, fusing design, Making and Craft Design, applied art work, sculptural architecture or design art; and at Lineo’s from the same artists / designers with work for the interior.

Angela van der Burght, curator © July 2011
Translation Ingrid Bongers

Organisation Glass is more! exposition: Engelbert Roovers