BEST OF BRITISH DESIGN Times vom 29.11.2005

      BEST OF BRITISH DESIGN Times vom 29.11.2005

      Danke Marco !!!

      The Times, 29. November 2005

      Best of British
      Tom Dyckhoff and Mick Hume
      What makes a modern design classic? One writer salutes an icon, leading designers name their choices and another writer bemoans the downscaling of style

      What timing. In the week that the Design Museum’s new year-long exhibition, Designing Modern Britain, opens, recounting the mighty story of one of the design world’s pioneering nations, London Transport is consigning a true star — one of the greatest pieces of British design — to the scrapheap.

      People have been getting very dewy-eyed about the Routemaster bus’s retirement from the streets of London, apart from the odd tourist route. I’m no fogey — I know that it has to go, resolutely old-school as it is in its cold-shouldering of the disabled. It’s what replaces it that galls.

      What was so magnificent about the Routemaster wasn’t just its design (so presciently curvaceous), its cosy domesticity (put the kettle on, conductor!) or the way it pooh-poohed health and safety Führers with its back door open to the wind, adding a rollercoaster frisson to the morning commute. It was the way it added tiny, pleasurable details to people’s everyday lives, as well as doing what it was designed to do — get us from A to B. It was a mass-produced object that we made our own.

      Britain lurches constantly between innovation and what Berthold Lubetkin called its “deep provincial sleep”. The nation is feeling pretty pioneering just now — we may not actually make much any more but creative brains from around the world do their creating here, attracted by those national characteristics so perfectly embodied in the Routemaster: free thinking, devil-may-careness, an ability to allow others to make their home. The old favourites in the exhibition — the Underground map, the Mini, Highpoint, the Festival of Britain, Concorde, Peter Saville’s record covers — emblemise this.

      The Routemaster’s replacements may be more accessible, more wipe-clean, but they lack that ability to be loved. In fact, they are designed specifically to repel — to stop our stains and smells and bumps and scrapes from lingering, to stop us getting on and off when we want, to stop us wanting to spend any more time on them than is necessary to get us to our destination.

      As such, like the modern British house, the modern British high street and so on, they are the perfect design for a plasticised, on-the-cheap nation that seeks its identity not in innovation but in health and safety nannying wrapped in a cellophane-thin sheen. The perfect design for new Labour. The perfect design for modern Britain.

      We may indeed be a world leader in design, but you’d never guess it from the way we dress.

      Designing Modern Britain, Design Museum, London SE1 (0870 8339955; designmuseum.org) from Saturday.

      We asked figures in the design world to pick their favourite British classic:



      NORMAN FOSTER

      The Moulton bicycle (the first one was designed in 1957). It’s an aesthetic object and a delight to use — flexible, responsive and comfortable. Like other engineered objects that I find exciting, its appearance and performance are indivisible: it has a kind of sparse beauty.


      ALICE RAWSTHORN
      director, Design Museum

      The best designs often work so well that we take them for granted, like the road signage system designed for the Department of Transport by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert from 1957 to 1967. Elegant, legible and coherent, it is one of Britain’s greatest contributions to modern graphic design.

      SIR CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING
      rector, Royal College of Art

      Harry Beck’s 1931 map of the London Underground: a great piece of British modernism, colour-coded and comforting, which shows distances between stations visually rather than geographically.

      TERENCE CONRAN

      The Royal Festival Hall was key to the changes taking place in Britain in 1951 and is symbolic of the transformation of Britain ever since. It was built by British architects, fitted out with Robin Day’s furniture, and has celebrated the very best of this country’s cultural activities. It will still be iconic when its refurbishment is finished in 2007.

      DYLAN JONES
      editor, GQ

      The red telephone box, which John Prescott is probably trying to get rid of as we speak. Now that mobile phones have made them obsolete, they should be preserved as places where policemen can shelter when it’s raining.

      GARETH WILLIAMS
      curator of 20th-century furniture and design, Victoria & Albert Museum

      The original telephone box by Giles Gilbert Scott — a grandiose little neo-Georgian building that dignified making a call. The design is all about manners and decorum.

      TOM DIXON
      designer

      The hovercraft (designed by Christopher Cockerell in 1956) seems to have all the qualities that make Britain great: a mad, original, groundbreaking design.

      EKOW ESHUN
      artistic director, the ICA

      The London Eye (designed by the husband- and-wife architects David Marks and Julia Barfield, and opened in late 1999) is absurd and playful and hovers over London like a giant Meccano set. It is a constant reminder not to take life too seriously.

      WAYNE HEMINGWAY
      Hemingway Design

      Deckchairs are an endless source of fun. No matter how many times you unfold them, they can still frustrate and perplex. They are very, very British. Or the Breville sandwich toaster: compact, easy to clean, fast and foolproof, democratic. Or the the two or three-bar electric fire — expensive but so versatile for toast and marshmallows.

      AMANDA LEVETE
      Future Systems

      The milk bottle that used to be delivered to our doorsteps. It was a great shape — curvy, utilitarian and with lovely metallic, colour-coded tops. You could see the cream risen to the top, and it made a great flower vase.

      BILL DUNSTER
      eco-designer, architect of BedZED

      The milk bottle — no other country has such a simple reminder of the nurturing countryside delivered daily to the urban doorstep. Classless design perfection honed through centuries, delivered by zero-emission vehicles, with zero waste and zero packaging.

      SAM JACOB
      Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT)

      The design of the football pitch is elegantly simple — a giant-sized graphic that distils football’s origin as a village-versus-village free-for-all played over a landscape of fields, rivers and hedges into a minimalist arrangement of rectangles, circles and dots.

      PAUL SIMMONS
      Timorous Beasties

      I love Matthew Hilton’s Balzac chair. Although it’s named after a French writer, it feels very British: contemporary, with a hint of tradition.

      FARSHID MOUSSAVI and ALEJANDRO ZAERA-POLO
      Foreign Office Architects

      The roundabout (first designed in New York in 1904 but really taken on by British architects in the mid-1960s) is a very British invention that gives priority to everybody at the same time, at the mere cost of some deviation in trajectory of movement. Simple crossings require a hierarchy to be established to avoid catastrophe, while the roundabout enables everybody to have near-priority — the picture of British culture.

      MARCUS FAIRS
      editor, Icon magazine

      Victorian cast-iron railings perfectly combine four British obsessions: practicality, engineering, privacy and a love of pomp. Highly ornate yet mass-produced, they satisfy the British suspicion of artistry and beauty for its own sake, and are essentially security devices dressed up as urban artworks, dignifing the humblest streets.

      EMILY CAMPBELL
      head of design and architecture, The British Council

      In about 1992 the peerlessly savant graphic designer Peter Saville predicted that things would get more “roundy”. He was right — everything from detergent packaging to portable electronics has lost its corners and hard edges. Britain pioneered this decades ago — the Routemaster bus, the London taxi — and today Jasper Morrison’s Lo & Hi-Pad series, Church’s brogues and Jonathan Ive’s original Apple iMac.

      ALASDHAIR WILLIS
      CEO, Established & Sons

      The humble Catseye, invented by a Yorkshireman, Percy Shaw. It has changed the world since it was conceived in 1934.

      WILL ALSOP
      architect

      The standard pint glass (not tankard) is unique to British drinkers. The bulbous part towards the top is brilliant, as it prevents a damp glass from slipping through the fingers. At its best it should be filled with a lightly chilled, slightly flat bitter — what a combination of pure Englishness.