1
FINANCIAL TIMES FEBRUARY 10/FEBRUARY 11 2007 ★ HOUSE & HOME 9 HOUSE & HOME WORK IN PROGRESS Taking the wraps off an ancient art In the first of a series, Janice Blackburn talks to Indian designer Gunjan Gupta about modern furniture inspired by the opulence of the Mughals In some respects, Gunjan Gupta’s career mirrors the progression of India from a third-world country stuck in its past to a sophisticated society competing on a glo- bal stage. Gupta grew up in subur- ban Mumbai and after high school studied interior design at the Sophia Poly- technic, a school famous for textiles. She says the pro- gramme “wasn’t great” but she parlayed it into an apprenticeship with Varsha Desai, a leading interior designer in India with many prominent industrialist fami- lies for clients. Although the “tradition- ally opulent old style” was not exactly one Gupta wanted to replicate, the experience gave her an opportunity to “explore the world of luxury”, travelling to top furniture fairs and poring over the best cata- logues. This bought her some time since she was still “figuring out what to do” with her own career. In 2000 she married and relocated with her husband – an environmental engineer – to Delhi, where she discov- ered Sharma Farm, a vast warehouse complex packed with antiques and exotic arte- facts from every corner of India. She describes it as inspirational. “It put me in touch with the idea that there was a history to many tradi- tional skills,” she explains. She began to travel around the country seeking out small artisan workshops and rare materials and, in Jaipur, unearthed a tech- nique that intrigued her. Sil- ver and gold wrapping was a type of ornamentation his- torically used on Mughal thrones as a way of display- ing their value while also demonstrating attributes of purity in a socio-religious context. It is documented as being the oldest form of fur- niture design in India (referred to in sacred Hindu texts such as the Rig Veda, Mhabhatara and Ramayana) but most modern-day exam- ples “are very degraded and of poor quality”, Gupta says. Having decided that she would revive and reinterpret the craft by applying it to her own contemporary furniture designs, she enrolled in Lon- don’s St Martins College of Art. This was not an easy leap. She had a two-year-old daughter, Sitara, at the time and so negotiated to study for a two-year research-based masters degree, juggling her time between London (four weeks each semester), Delhi, Jaipur and Udaipur. With the support of her husband and mother and the encourage- ment of Simon Fraser, course director at St Martins, she also developed prototypes of silver-wrapped furniture. At her graduation show in July 2006, she showed three stunning, minimal, silver- wrapped pieces. Luckily, she says, “people loved them” and in September she launched her newly formed company Wrap at London’s 100% Design trade fair. It was an ambitious first step. But “I wanted to test whether there really was a market for something as insane as gold- and metal- wrapped furniture,” she says. The gamble paid off. Fol- lowing favourable press cov- erage not only in the UK but also from as far afield as Russia, Elle Décor gave her an award for her Dining Throne, a wooden chair wrapped in gold leaf and thick sheets of pure silver, and Eastern Recline, a low Indian-inspired lounging chair. Pamploni, the Florence- based silver manufacturer, has asked her to design a collection and well-known New York interior designer Peter Marino is interested in her making reflective wall tiles for him in gold and sil- ver. Maithili Ahluwaliea, owner of Mumbai design space Bungalow Eight, has commissioned an exclusive range to launch this sum- mer. And Aston Martin has even contacted her about a silver-wrapped car interior. Gupta now has two full- time employees working in her Dehli design studio and has linked up with a team of carpenters that makes the wooden frames for tables and chairs. These are then sent to be wrapped by a community of skilled artisans in Jaipur. Production takes six to eight weeks and the pieces are priced from £500 to £1,500, although the seed money for the business came from her interior design career savings and from family. The next big step will come in May when Gupta presents her work at New York’s International Con- temporary Furniture Fair with the support of the Brit- ish European Design Group. Polly Dickens, design direc- tor of the group, also wants the designer to explore cheaper forms of the craft using brass and white metal instead of silver and gold. Gupta is talented and savvy, a woman focused on building a profitable business around an ancient art. Just like India itself, she is a work in progress. Aston Martin has even contacted her about a silver-wrapped car interior A giant with an eye on ‘the little man’ In a new exhibition, Shigeru Ban pays tribute to his fellow architect and humanitarian Alvar Aalto, writes Nicole Swengley F inland’s Alvar Aalto was one of the great 20th century archi- tects. Japan’s Shigeru Ban is one of today’s brightest stars. Aalto, who died in 1976, worked primarily in his home country through an age in which hand-craftsmanship segued into industrialisation. Ban, 50, studied in the US and now works between offices in Tokyo and Paris, navigating an increasingly computer- ised and automated industry. The two men come from different times and cultural, economic and tech- nological backgrounds. Their work dif- fers aesthetically and technically. Yet they are united by a design philosophy that ranks humanitarian values above style. And that is why London’s Barbi- can Art Gallery has asked Ban to co- curate the first UK exhibition celebrat- ing Aalto’s work. “I hold Aalto’s compassionate approach to architecture in the highest regard,” Ban says. “His ultimate goal as an architect was to promote comfort and happiness to ‘the little man’ – to ordinary people. His great innovations were not just intended for his own artistic expression but were an explora- tion of ways to distribute better hous- ing and living conditions to the greater part of society.” So Aalto worked not only on innova- tive private residences and civic and cultural buildings but also low-cost housing and industrial estates. He focused on the details – furniture, light fittings, glassware, textiles, jew- ellery and book covers – as well as the big picture – town and even regional planning projects. Taking the environ- ment as an inspiration, he employed or created organic shapes and pro- moted the use of natural and local materials. His rational approach to problem solving resulted in some won- derful ideas. And a capacity to explore a structure’s emotional and psycholog- ical impact led him to believe that “architecture is not mere decoration; it is a deeply biological, if not a pre- dominantly moral matter”. For Ban – who founded the Volunteer Architects Network charity in 1995 and is known for designing emergency shel- ters and temporary housing for survi- vors of wars and natural disasters in Rwanda, Japan, Turkey, India and Sri Lanka – Aalto’s ethos is deeply reso- nant. In fact, Ban’s eureka moment – his realisation that he could use light- weight, low-cost paper tubes structur- ally – happened during his involvement with an earlier exhibition of the archi- tect’s work at Tokyo’s Axis Gallery in 1986. This came two years after his first in-person exposure to Aalto-designed buildings as a photographer’s assistant in Finland. “In Aalto’s architecture I found a space created to complement its context,” Ban recalls. “It was the kind of space that one wouldn’t be able to comprehend through photographs and text in a book; one would need to experience it on the spot in order to understand the quality of it.” Although Ban’s architecture is differ- ent from Aalto’s, it is clearly fired by it, with natural shapes and innovative uses of materials. Aside from the inter- national aid work, he has been lauded for private homes, including the Cur- tain Wall House, which has glass walls folding back to open the rooms, ele- mentally, on two sides, and the Picture Window House, in which a terrace, garden and front room are designed as a single space. For the Barbican exhibition, Ban has created curving cardboard tube walls and platforms and undulating paper ceilings, transforming the gallery inte- rior. He and Juhani Pallasmaa, former director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki, have selected 15 key projects to chart Aalto’s career and designed analytical models to show how he used materials, handled space and dealt with details. These sectional models are, in them- selves, quite beautiful. The one of the House of Culture in Helsinki, famous for its undulating brick walls, shows not only their shape but also a cross- section of structural brick-work, while the Baker House model shows how light was diffused within the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology dormi- tory. Alongside these are specially com- missioned photographs of Aalto build- ings that highlight the beauty of his shapes, textures and details. Ban thinks the chosen projects are fundamental to understanding Aalto’s architectural philosophy and directly relate to contemporary building dilemmas. Others include the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanitorium, Villa Mairea and the AA System houses, all of which are in Finland. The first project embraced numer- ous humane concepts – splash-free sinks for patients’ rooms, mobile side tables that double as patients’ dining tables, sloping floors near windows to avoid an accumulation of dust and double-glazed windows to keep out cold air. Aalto’s attention to detail meant finding the exact angle for a birch bentwood chair that would best aid a sanitorium patient’s breathing. Examples of it are still produced and sold today. Villa Mairea epitomises Aalto’s sig- nature style in terms of space arrange- ments, use of materials (forest-like vertical wooden pillars) and its nod to traditional Japanese architecture, rustic Finnish farms and continental modernism. The architect aimed to har- monise buildings within their settings and blurred indoor-outdoor boundaries, often reversing convention. So the villa living room became a forest space with a corner garden gazebo. Furnishings and lighting designed for the house were later produced commercially by Artek, the company that he set up with the villa owner’s wife, Maire Gul- lichsen, and design critic Nils Gustav Hahl, and which still exists today. Because Aalto hated the idea of mass- produced houses, he strived for “flexible standardisation” – a way of offering maximum variation through different building parts, using them as “living cells”. This concept is exemplified by the prefabricated wooden AA System houses commissioned by the Ahlstrom Corporation in 1940 and intended to relieve wartime housing shortages. Two other projects – La Maison Car- rée in France and Scinasoki, an Aalto- planned Finnish town – are presented alongside one another to show how his ideas about space, access and flow were consistent, regardless of scale. The house’s hall serves as a communal space, much like a village square. Tomoko Sato, the Barbican Gallery curator, observes that Aalto’s civic buildings were also designed like com- fortable houses rather than monumen- tal institutions. “His interest was to make people feel at home, not to create a hierarchy,” she says. Aalto’s focus on lighting is highlighted by his Viipuri City Library reader’s room, where rows of cylinder-shaped top lights minimise the shadows cast under readers’ hands, and the Church of the Three Crosses in Imatra, Finland, where skylights and sculptured white walls transform the building into a luminous light source. Aalto “explored the most efficient ways to take in natural light in the northern latitudes,” Ban explains. “When he designed a building, he always seemed to have been conscious of incor- porating an efficient system to diffuse [light] indoors.” It’s ironic that the venue for this exhibition is the Barbican Centre – a place that is architecturally uncom- fortable, cluttered and not easy to use. It’s a far cry from the “earthly para- dise” that Aalto believed to be “the ultimate goal of the architect”. Still, thanks in large part to Ban’s involve- ment, the show is an interesting one, that says as much about the future as it does about the past. “I hope [it] will raise questions about architecture’s role today and generate debate about issues such as sustaina- bility and resources that are common to all of us,” Sato says. At the very least, visitors can observe the interplay between two architectural soulmates. ‘Alvar Aalto: Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban’ runs from February 22- May 13 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. A rare talk by Shigeru Ban about his work and Aalto’s legacy will take place at 7pm on February 20. Tel: +44 0845-120 7550; www.barbican. org.uk/gallery ‘It was the kind of space that one wouldn’t be able to comprehend through photographs and text in a book’ ‘Forest space’: the living room at Villa Mairea. Top, l-r, Alvar Aalto, details of his work and Shigeru Ban Eva and Perlti Ingervo/Shigeru Ban Architects Gunjan Gupta, and, left, some of her work Amit Bhargava/WPN
