the australian way august < rugs>...stepping on a designer rugs creation on your way to beach...

ART RUGS

NOT ALL OF Australia’s most arresting designs are on international catwalks. Some are underfoot. Rugs have become scene-stealing artworks in their own right, reflecting everything from strict minimalism to opulent excess, proving that when you want to make

an impression, it’s smart to start from the ground up. It’s an area find-ing favour with couturiers and more traditional rug makers.

The Designer Rugs company, started in 1986 by Israeli migrants Eli Tal and his son, Yosi, has developed a reputation for collaborating with leading artists from the world of fashion and fine art. It has launched a collection of exclusive designs by Akira Isogawa (abstract cherry blossom, from $4990), Dinosaur Designs (bold graphics and candy colours, from $3390) and Vixen (a signature style of layers and textures, from $2856). For her collection, fabric designer Julie Patterson, whose Cloth label has its own following, emphasised organic shapes based on native plants (from $2350). Rugs created by the design duo behind Sydney company Blueandbrown were inspired by the urban geometry of Milton Glaser graphics and the optical illusions observed in rockpools on the Australian coastline (from $2856). There is also a range based on an interpretation of Aboriginal paintings by the late Minnie Pwerle (limited-edition rugs from $7950), who gained prominence with her exuberant and colourful brush-work. Early next year, Brisbane-based fashion duo Easton Pearson will also release a rug collection.

WORDS CAROLINE BAUM

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magic carpet ride

Designer Rugs collections: 1 Blueandbrown Optropic; 2 Akira Isogawa Bansyu; 3 Dinosaur Designs Jewel;4 Cloth Overhead Roots; 5 Minnie Pwerle Camp Sites

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Walk all over it or hang it on the wall – the abstract rug has become a work of art.

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The rug is the foundation... a good rug will last at least a couple of lifetimes‘‘

ART RUGS

Creating your own custom rug takes up to three months, using premium-quality New Zealand wool and pure silk for extra lustre. While some pieces are woven in Australia, most are created in Thai-land or Nepal. Designer Rugs clientele includes many of Australia’s luxury resorts – next time you go barefoot at Bunker Bay in Western Australia, or at Quay West Magenta Shores in NSW, you’re probably stepping on a Designer Rugs creation on your way to beach or pool.

More than 25 years in the business, rug trade doyenne Robyn Cosgrove specialises in contemporary designs (from $3500). Look-ing for dramatic effect and maximum impact, Cosgrove designs some pieces herself and showcases the work of New York designer Stephanie Odegard (from $19,500). She also has a range that pays tribute to the lines and curves of modernist Bauhaus style for those with a more retro look.

Cosgrove says the current trend is for “thin, dense rugs that are heavy, but fluid enough to wrap yourself in. Clients are requesting silk inlay accents because silk adds lustre and light and feels great under-foot. Colours are subtle neutrals rather than attention-seeking shazzam. You don’t want a rug to dominate a space,” she says.

Cosgrove is adamant that the best way to decorate a room is to start from the floor. “The rug is the foundation. Ideally, you select your furnishing fabrics and furniture around it. And a good rug, that is well made in terms of materials, dyes, density of knotting, will last at least a couple of lifetimes. The best ones mature with age.”

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1 Floral 300 Florence Broadhurst for Knots Rugs UK – Cadrys will launch a version in November; 2 Jan Kath’s Vintage Roma for Cadrys; 3 Stephanie Odegard Ainu rug for Robyn Cosgrove Rugs; 4 Vixen Blossom for Designer Rugs

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ART RUGS

RUG DEALERS

ROBYN COSGROVE RUGS168 Queen Street, Woollahra, Sydney. (02) 9328 7692.www.robyncosgroverugs.com.au

SIGNATURE PRINTSUnit 2/3 Hayes Road, Rosebery, Sydney. (02) 8338 8400. www.signatureprints.com.au

SNOWRUGS GALLERY241 Narone Creek Road, Wollombi. (02) 4998 3276.www.snowrugs.com.au

DESIGNER RUGS509 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt. (02) 9550 9933. 100 New South Head Road,

Edgecliff, Sydney. (02) 9328 4111.925 Ann Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. (07) 3852 6433.130-138 St Kilda Road, Melbourne. (03) 9534 0660.www.designerrugs.com.au

CUSTOMWEAVE CARPETS + RUGS88 Dynon Road, West Melbourne. (03) 9376 6622.www.customweave.com.au

CADRYS 133 New South Head Road, Edgecliff, Sydney. (02) 9328 6144.498 Glenmore Road, Edgecliff, Sydney. (02) 9328 9188.www.cadrys.com.au

Best known for its selection of handwoven Persian and Oriental rugs, the Cadry family is moving with the times. In response to the tastes of a younger clientele, Cadrys is selling new designs by inter-national artists, featuring strong lines and subtle colours.

The Florence Broadhurst wallpapers that have enjoyed a recent revival are now also spawning a range of rugs by Cadrys, which will launch in November. Working closely with the Broadhurst design library at Signature Prints, Cadrys is creating a collection of hand-knotted rugs that capture the Broadhurst flair for bright colour and big, bold patterns (from $2950).

Nina Danko designs for the SnowRugs Gallery (from $2500) and her own label, Danko Designs, creating motifs based on organic patterns in nature, from bamboo to the oceanic ripples. She draws her inspiration from an eclectic range of cultures, including her own Russian heritage, as well as Mexican and Tibetan iconography.

At Customweave Carpets + Rugs, designer Katherine Power intro-duces unorthodox materials into the mix, adding detailing in leather, wood and even glass to her concepts (from $350/sq m). They need to be treated with care and are not designed for heavy traffic or young families. In fact, for rugs to give enduring pleasure both visually and underfoot, owners should ideally borrow the now fashionable ecological mantra “tread lightly upon the earth”. It feels even better if you slip off your shoes first. �

1 Katherine Porter Wooden Butterflies for Customweave Carpets + Rugs; 2 Cloth Banksia for Designer Rugs

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“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness”

~ F R A N K G E H R Y

WORDS CRAIG ALLCHIN

1997, FRANK GEHRY changed the architectural world with his Guggenheim Museum outpost in Bilbao. The curvaceous, titanium-clad building made Gehry a star and put the industrial city in Spain’s Basque region on the map. A flood of tourists came to Bilbao to see the architecture that signalled a new century.

The building’s extravagance was a deliberate strategy by the city governors to shift the economy of the city from its declining industries into a new economy based on culture and tourism. With Gehry, Bilbao aced it. The Guggenheim Bilbao has attracted more than 10 million visitors, last year generating more than €220m ($362.7m) in economic activity.

Cities have since been trying to repeat the magic equation of “one times absolutely extraordinary building equals new economy”. Enter the “starchitects” whose brief is often to create an image for a city as much as to design a building.

Hot architectsIn this new architectural order, the old principle of “form follows function” doesn’t apply. It is “form finds fame”. Buildings have to have the wow factor and the starchitects are called on to put their wildest dreams down on paper.

The dreams of the dozen or so starchitects come from different places – Frank Gehry, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava and Japanese master architect Tadao Ando spent their formative years with artists and/or in sculp-ture and craft. Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Jean Nouvel travelled a more traditional route,

Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain

The advent of “starchitect” cities could herald a brave new world of design opulence coupled

with environmental responsibility.

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ARCHITECTURE

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starting with small buildings and working their way up to significant commissions in their 30s or early 40s. Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl spent their early careers teaching at universities, developing theoretical propositions for buildings and space without the crushing realities of the construction and finance industries.

They are all able to generate enough publicity with their presentations to kick off the branding of a cultural institution, corporation – or sometimes a city – with a press conference and a few three-dimensional computer renderings. The Water Cube, Beijing, venue for

the 2008 Olympic swimming events

HotspotsIn Beijing this month, funky forms and starchitects combine in the two key stadiums for the Olympic Games: the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. Both buildings cleverly play with the micro and macro scale. Chinese birds’ nests were previously best known outside China as a delicacy in a traditional soup. Now the bird’s nest is blown up to a global scale as the main Olympic stadium, made of giant steel twigs and designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron.

The Water Cube design has a similar origin at the micro scale. Based on the natural formation of soap bubbles, the building has a steel frame, an inner and an outer layer, and “bubbles” made from an inflatable, transparent Teflon-like material called ETFE. The original design idea came after the Bird’s Nest, not from a starchitect, but through almost the opposite process – an international collaboration between Australian architecture firm PTW, Arup engineers, China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) and the CSCEC Shenzhen Design Institute.

Representing the circle and the square – the Chinese cosmology symbols for heaven and earth – the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube bring a cultural balance to the Olympic site as they sit side by side across Beijing’s main north-south axis.

The games will be broadcast from the site, but the soon-to-be-completed China Central Television (CCTV) tower, designed by Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA, will be

ARCHITECTUREThe Bird’s Nest, Beijing, the athletics stadium for the 2008 Olympics

Below: Zaha Hadid’s performing arts centre in Abu Dhabi (computer render)

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broadcast headquarters for China. At 54 storeys, it will contain about 500,000sq m (50ha) of floor space. It stands out from the crowd, appearing to be a typical office tower twisted into a kinked loop to form two towers.

As athletes and spectators get off the plane in Beijing, they will disembark in the Sir Norman Foster-designed terminal building, at 130ha the largest airport building in the world, with a bright red interior that draws its inspiration from the form of a dragon.

Shanghai, determined not to be outdone by Beijing, has secured World Expo 2010, with the theme Better City, Better Life. Expos have always been about showing off a nation’s latest technology and inven-tions. The pavilions are often a laboratory that symbolises this spirit. The pavilions themselves are relatively small-scale buildings, so are designed by up-and-coming architects, not established stars.

The UK pavilion competition winner is Heatherwick Studios, which works on product design, sculpture and architecture. The building is conceived as “a pavilion of ideas… clad in a mass of spines… each spine is tipped with a tiny coloured light source, which can be programmed with a variety of images, colours and messages.”

The Polish pavilion, designed by Wojciech Kakowski, Marcin Mostafa and Natalia Paszkowska, wraps a traditional Polish paper cut-out pattern around the building as a contemporary reference to folk art, creating a striking light screen, day and night.

The Ren Building, designed by PLOT architects (which has since split into BIG and JDS), is proposed as a hotel, leisure and conference centre on the Expo site, and is based on the Chinese character for people – ren. Criticised as being too literal, it could nevertheless become a striking symbol for the exposition in 2010.

Very hot spotsDubai has taken architectural and urban magic tricks to a new level. In the 1950s, Dubai was a Bedouin trading port with a population of some 40,000, clustered around a protected harbour on Dubai Creek. Oil was discovered in the 1960s and the ruler, Sheikh Rashid, had the foresight to recognise that the oil supply would be limited. His strategy was to use oil money to build infrastructure and an economy based on trade, building up their seaport and airport to become major hubs of the Middle East.

His son and current ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, added a tourism focus, beginning a program of commissioning the biggest and the best. The ultra-luxurious Burj Al Arab hotel – described as “seven-star” – was first in 1999, followed by the Palm islands. The three Palms – The Palm Jumeirah, The Palm Jebel Ali, and the largest, The Palm Deira – will house more than a million people. Dubai’s desert location makes water a precious commodity, and waterfront land the most

A render of Shanghai’s Ren Building (and inset)

The Ren Building is based on the Chinese character for people ‘‘

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valuable. In simple real estate terms, The Palms look like inverted canal estates, maximising the waterfront real estate. They also play games with global scale, being the largest manmade islands in the world, visible from space.

Nakheel developments, responsible for The Palms, has added another scale to the waterfront with The World, a set of exclusive private islands in the shape of a map of the world and, responding to demand, has recently announced The Universe, a set of islands drawing inspiration from the solar system and sitting inshore from The World.

Rem Koolhaas has designed a proposal for the city centre district of the Dubai waterfront project, a square island just inland from Palm Jebel Ali. Always controversial, he has proposed office towers set on a regular grid that he terms “the generic city”. Then, as if to highlight just how bland the city that he has designed is, he proposes two architectural state-ments on the waterfront to liven things up. One is a sphere with a central hole, like an eyeball, dubbed the Death Star; the other a less extraordinary spiralling office tower.

Dubai also has the tallest building in the world under construction, Burj Dubai, designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP. While its final height remains a tightly held secret, it is due for completion in 2009.

Taking the starchitect syndrome to the extreme, Zabeel Properties has commissioned Brad Pitt, the actor with a passion for architecture, to design a new hotel in Dubai.

Two hours’ drive south is Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, a city planning to move out of the shadow of Dubai by creating a more upmarket tourism and business niche courtesy of an association with some of the most sophisticated cultural brands in the world.

It has snared the Guggenheim/Gehry combination and has also ordered a Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre outpost – the first in the world; a Zaha Hadid-designed performing arts centre; a Tadao Ando-designed maritime museum; and, recently announced, a Norman Foster-designed Sheikh Zayed National Museum. All will be set in a cultural precinct on the tip of Saadiyat island, a short drive from downtown Abu Dhabi.

Abu Dhabi’s proposed Louvre outpost (model)

Zabeel Properties has commissioned Brad Pitt to design a new hotel in Dubai‘‘

Rem Koolhaas has designs on Dubai

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Hot institutionsThe five starchitect-designed projects on Saadiyat Island have raised the bar. How will other institutions and cities garner such attention from a single building?

Climate change challenges may give new purpose – beyond the brave and beautiful form making – to how and why we build. Architects, institutions and city governors, looking for advantages over the competition, will need to invest in content as well as style to explore low carbon emission buildings and sustainable concepts. Renzo Piano’s new California Academy of Sciences building adopts this approach with clever climate control and a “living” green roof to replace the park space annexed by the building.

Perkins + Will architects consulted on Antilia in Mumbai, a 27-storey residential tower for Mukesh Ambani, head of India’s largest private sector firm, Reliance Industries. Antilia will have the largest and tallest “living wall” in the world, a vertical garden climbing 40 storeys. If the private sector in India is entering the “form-finding-fame” game, it’s the sort of game the world wants to see them playing.

Hot planetIt’s not just buildings – entire cities are now racing towards sustainability. Masdar is proposed as the world’s first zero-carbon, waste-free city, located on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi and designed by Foster + Partners. It aims to help solve the problem that the Gulf States’ oil exacerbates – climate change. It will be a centre of development for new energy production ideas, designed in the old tradition of a high-density, mixed-use, walled city. Narrow streets and paths provide shade and keep energy requirements low. It is also going to be car-free.

Dongtan claims it will be the first “eco-city”. Construction is scheduled to start in early 2009 on Chongming Island near Shanghai. Designed by Arup engineers as low-consumption and zero-carbon, it will provide a methodology for improved sustainability in the many cities across China undergoing rapid urban growth.

The urban laboratories next to Shanghai and Abu Dhabi are likely to spin off some exciting concepts. Whether these concepts can be adopted by other developing cities is the question, as these countries urbanise at breakneck speed. More traditional centres of architectural innovation might have the answers. In the Netherlands, for example, with much of the country below sea level, architects are used to designing for adversity and are preparing for new challenges.

Wherever new ideas are generated and developed, archi-tects will be critical to their implementation. In a world where buildings account for about half the greenhouse emissions, a new architectural principle might be “form fixes future”. �

California Academy of Sciences (and below)

Masdar is proposed as the world’s first zero-carbon, waste-free city ‘‘

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ARTIST PROFILE


Alice in WonderlandABI ALICE LOVES mathematics. She has no idea why. “At high school, I wasn’t good at it at all. But I’ve developed a love of working with numbers and coordinates, of trying to create a harmonious composition out of different combinations of numbers and plotting them on a grid.” The Sydney-based artist’s compositions have been translated into stainless steel by renowned Italian design company Alessi and can now be found in shops from Shanghai to Stockholm.

A highlight of a recent European trip was an exhibition of mathematical objects at London’s Science Museum. “That was my idea of heaven”, says Alice, who had been reading up on ancient mathematicians, but had never “been drawn to Fibonacci numbers or the golden mean – they don’t inspire me at all. I make up my own systems; I have more of an intuitive way of working. One day, I’d love to have someone at one of the universities see if there are any patterns in them.”

Her working method often begins with a pair of compasses and a stack of graph paper as she draws up increasingly intricate geometric compositions based on arcs, lines and circles. From there, Alice, who “sat in galleries and drew pictures from the age of six”, is likely to work on a painting, addressing colour and form. In many instances, the completed paintings become the foundation for her three-dimensional sculptural objects. Alice achieves this by transferring the exact geometric composition of her painting onto graph paper. The two-dimensional composition is then

Beauty is the ideal when ABI ALICE creates her works of art – which, fortuitously, are also functional.

WORDS LETA KEENS PHOTOGRAPHY CHRIS CHEN

Working the angles: Abi Alice with geometric paintings

DESIGN SPECIAL

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ARTIST PROFILE


‘‘ There’s a defi nite blurring of media – one idea feeds into the next, each stage appears to be as important as any other

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Abi Alice stainless steel Harmonic basket from the Alessi Spring/Summer 2008 collection (above)

Pompidou No.5, Painting By Eye collection, Photography-Free Zone series. Photograph printed on Hahnemühle paper (below)

transformed into a three-dimensional object by cutting, bending and folding. Along the way, she may work on a photography project she can see links to her interest in geometry (Photography-Free Zone, one of her abstract photographic series, concentrates on shadows and ceiling details – rather than the works on the wall – at art galleries and museums). There’s a definite blurring of media – one idea feeds into the next, each stage appears to be as important as any other.

“Osmosis, is that the right word? People ask me what my preferred medium is, but I don’t have one. It’s more about the concept, about how identical geometric fundamentals can be used to translate into very different outcomes.”

The stainless steel Resonance, a curvaceous centrepiece Alice created in collaboration with Alessi in 2006, started out as a drawing on graph paper. Rather than the unnatural complexities generated by computer, its pure form suggests a direct connection with the human hand. “It’s important in my work to keep the essence of the maker,” says the recipient of the 2007 Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for sculpture. “I hold on to that handmade approach.”

In reality, the creation of Resonance began much earlier. In 1995, Alice was one of 40 students invited to participate in a University of New South Wales-hosted workshop run by Alberto Alessi, managing director of his family’s company. “I related to his philosophy,” she says. “He’s a real thinker and I think deeply about my work, too. I always thought he’d be someone I’d be interested in collaborating with.” Two years later she visited the Alessi headquarters at Lake Orta in Italy “just to have a look. A couple of years after that, while I was doing my masters degree part-time, I reintroduced myself and we discussed some of my work.”

Alessi showed interest in one of her projects – a series of “mathematical” folded objects. He asked to see samples, but “once they looked at them in the technical area, they realised they couldn’t get the quality with a machine that I was achieving by hand”. Alessi asked Alice to send other ideas. She presented work she’d started many years earlier, but hadn’t quite completed. It was the original concept (conceived in 1996) of transforming drawings into paintings and paint-ings into sculptures. After being evaluated by technical and marketing points teams, Resonance was up and running. “It was a project dear to my heart and I was thrilled they were keen to produce the sculptural element,” she says. In doing so, Alice, who received her masters from the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts last year, became the seventh Australian – and the first woman from Sydney – to have a piece produced by Alessi.

The entire project took more than a year, with emails going back and forth, and Alice visiting Alessi to see prototypes. As for standing back and seeing the finished object, “that didn’t really sink in until much later. It had been such a busy time and we’d been working on it for so long that it wasn’t an overnight ‘wow’. It’s only when I’m travelling overseas and see it in a shop that I think, ‘That’s my piece’.”

Alice is likely to see many more in the future. She’s currently in discussion with Alessi on a number of projects. This year, the company released Harmonic, a basket-shaped piece in the same series as Resonance, as well as a smaller Resonance fruit holder. Part of the reason they work, she believes, is that she didn’t set out to create a functional object. “The primary purpose is always to create a beautiful form, a beautiful composition. If the object can translate into something that can be functional as well, that’s wonderful.” �

See more of Abi Alice’s design at www.abialice.com

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the australian way august < rugs>...stepping on a designer rugs creation on your way to beach...

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