Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • About
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Design
  • Milan’s PR economy
  • The Guardian
  • 2011
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Milan’s PR economy

Last week, as it does every April, the design world descended on Milan for the furniture fair, accompanied by thousands of journalists and an army of PRs. As the designers and other VIPs moved from champagne reception to champagne reception in chauffeur-driven cars, you could have been forgiven for thinking that they do very well for themselves, thank you. But on the 50th anniversary of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, what better time to reveal that the vast majority of them can barely pay the rent? Edgar Allan Poe might have been thinking of the Milan furniture fair when he wrote, “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream”.

In the endless exhibition halls at the Rho fairgrounds, 2,700 furniture brands exhibited their wares over half a million square metres. Many of these lamps, chairs and tables are prototypes produced by designers for free in the hope they will make their money back in royalties. Only the lucky few ever do. I spoke to one young designer who has five items in production with a respected Italian manufacturer – no small achievement. “My royalty cheque last year came to €600,” he said. “Half a month’s rent.”

It is not uncommon for manufacturers to commission exciting young talents to populate their exhibition stands with eye-catching pieces that never hit the market. They may be widely published, win awards and earn the brand a reputation for innovation – and still not go into production. In that case, the designer won’t make a penny. Most of the time they don’t even get advances. “Ah, but think of the exposure, the PR value,” the manufacturers argue. But without ample remuneration, designers will keep passing their lack of earnings down the food chain to their unpaid interns. As the British designer Ilse Crawford puts it: “Designers often end up being voluntary workers for millionaires.”

The trouble is that the royalty system was introduced in the 1950s, when Italy was still the furniture manufacturer to the world. In those days, the risks of a royalty-only payment were worth taking. With an entire country to modernise and a rising middle class, a piece of modern design could shift hundreds of thousands of units. But with the advent of cheap manufacturing in China and budget retailers such as Ikea, Italian furniture is now a luxury industry. Not only do they sell less, there’s more competition. And yet no up-and-coming designer would dream of turning down an opportunity from a manufacturer, because there are hundreds of others waiting to take their place if they do.

A decade ago, the idea that manufacturers could pay their designers in PR was still credible. A mogul such as Giulio Cappellini could launch the careers of a Jasper Morrison or Marc Newson in the 80s, or the Bouroullec brothers in the 90s, simply by giving them the nod. These days, there is so much emerging talent that companies flit from one hot young designer to the next on a yearly basis. In the fashion-driven novelties market, product cycles are becoming shorter and shorter – another reason why the royalty system (the designer gets 3% of the wholesale price) doesn’t pay off. Eero Saarinen, designer of the classic Tulip chairs for Knoll in the 1950s, made only five chairs in his career, and all are still in production. The Munich-based superstar Konstantin Grcic can boast that many this year alone (if you include a stool and a sofa).

It is no wonder that designers see what they exhibit in Milan as marketing – what Mailer called “advertisements for myself” – in the hope that exposure will lead to a job designing an interior, or a bathroom tile, or if they’re lucky a limited-edition gallery piece. Because none of this is sustainable – not financially, let alone environmentally – and the facts of the matter seemed to hit home this year. If 2010 will be remembered as the time the Salone’s attendance was decimated by an Icelandic volcano, 2011 was the year journalists quizzed manufacturers about their payment structures, posting whatever they could dig up on Twitter.

Milan may be the annual blowout of a multibillion pound industry, but it’s a mirage, and not just for the designers. The embossed invitations of lavish parties are often fig leaves over the manufacturers’ own awkward finances. But let’s not forget that it’s also a major cultural event, and there were artefacts worth mentioning. Londoners Barber Osgerby produced a chair for Vitra that wasn’t just about styling. The Tip Ton has two seating positions, one tipped forward for upright working and the other tipped back for a more relaxed posture. Designed specifically for schools, this stackable, durable chair might have graced classrooms across the country before the government’s axe came down on the Building Schools for the Future programme.

It was also good to see the Bouroullecs’ Aim Lamp go into production with Flos. These vine-like spotlights began life as a limited-edition piece for Galerie Kreo in Paris, and while the industry has sometimes viewed gallery pieces as extravagances, for once the argument that they are pre-production experiments turned out to be true. Similarly, I was surprised to see a 1970s classic by the 80-year-old Alessandro Mendini revived by Magis. His Proust Armchair, a rococo heap daubed in pointillist brushstrokes, was an icon of postmodernism, and here it is reincarnated as an industrial plastic chair.

Beyond the fair, among the hundreds of fringe events across the city, a pair of far more youthful Italians were garnering attention. The Botanica collection by Formafantasma, who are actually based in the Netherlands, was a definite highlight. Their installation at the Spazio Rossana Orlandi showed an extraordinary series of vases and other objects whose pretext was that the age of oil-derived plastics had never happened. Made of plant-based polymers and odd materials such as bois durci (a 19th-century recipe of sawdust mixed with animal blood), the collection evoked a lost Amazonian civilisation discovered by Darwinian anthropologists. It’s an atavistic eco-fantasy, done with flair.

Finally, the show by recent graduates of the Design Academy Eindhoven demonstrated again that no other school consistently produces such imaginative work. Massoud Hassani’s wind-powered anti-landmine ball was inspired by his native Afghanistan, a country rumoured to have more mines than people. Even more impressive was Dirk van der Kooij’s use of a retired production robot from a Chinese factory to print out chairs made of plastic from old fridges.

Eindhoven’s students are going places. The question is: where? As design schools churn out ever more graduates, their future looks ever more precarious. There are some important lessons to be learned, though. Today’s designers need to be tougher business people; they need to negotiate harder and hold on to their copyright. But if there is one moral to this story it is this: design is a way of life that so many people want to participate in, they’ll do it whether or not there’s a viable living in it. Even some of the manufacturers are haemorrhaging cash to hold on to this.

Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Category
  • Title
  • Publication
  • Year
  • Architecture Activist architects Al Jazeera 2014
  • Architecture Djenné’s mud mosque Icon 2010
  • Architecture Honeywell, I’m home! e-flux journal 2015
  • Architecture Maison Dom-ino Dezeen 2014
  • Architecture PREVI, Lima Domus 2011
  • Architecture Revolutionary housing in Argentina Domus 2011
  • Architecture Robin Hood Gardens SQM 2014
  • Architecture The Base, Chocó Nuevotopias 2013
  • Architecture The High Line Icon 2009
  • Architecture Walter Benjamin puts activists to shame? Here 2013
  • Cities Beirut Icon 2006
  • Cities DIY cities (the limitations) Uncube 2014
  • Cities Edge City (São Paulo) Strelka Press 2012
  • Cities How radical is Radical Urbanism? Catalogue 2015
  • Cities Istanbul Icon 2010
  • Cities Jenin Icon 2005
  • Cities Life on the edge Moscow Urban Forum 2013
  • Cities Seoul Condé Nast Traveller 2012
  • Cities Shenzhen Icon 2008
  • Cities Unreal estate (London) Domus 2012
  • Cities Urban commons The Guardian 2015
  • Design Adventure gear The Guardian 2010
  • Design Beneath the street, the wilderness: Occupy and Bear Grylls Here 2012
  • Design Craft fetishism The Guardian 2011
  • Design Craft fetishism: From objects to things Disegno 2012
  • Design Design and the Right Domus 2013
  • Design Design and violence Dezeen 2013
  • Design Dreaming of year zero Bio 50 2014
  • Design Fabbers, dabblers and microstars Icon 2009
  • Design London riots The Guardian 2011
  • Design Luxury watch culture The Guardian 2010
  • Design Milan’s PR economy The Guardian 2011
  • Design On William Gibson on design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Open design Dezeen 2014
  • Design Samsung vs Apple Domus 2013
  • Design The internet of broken things Dezeen 2014
  • Design The post-spectacular economy Van Abbemuseum 2011
  • Design Ultramundane Domus 2013
  • People Alejandro Aravena Icon 2009
  • People Do Ho Suh Icon 2008
  • People Enzo Mari Icon 2009
  • People Ettore Sottsass Icon 2007
  • People Francis Kere Icon 2010
  • People Richard Sapper Domus 2013
  • Reviews Cool Tools by Kevin Kelly Dezeen 2014
  • Reviews Hearts of the City by Herbert Muschamp Icon 2010
  • Reviews Latin America in Construction at MoMA Architectural Record 2015
  • Reviews Mad Max: Fury Road Dezeen 2015
  • Reviews Max Bill Icon 2010
  • Reviews Philips shaver Icon 2008
  • Reviews Postmodernism at the V&A The Guardian 2010
  • Reviews Rebel Cities by David Harvey Art Review 2012
  • Reviews The Craftsman by Richard Sennett Icon 2008
  • Reviews The Historical Museum, Sarajevo The Guardian 2011
  • Reviews Together by Richard Sennett Art Review 2012
Justin McGuirk
Selected writing 2005 – 2015
  • Design
  • Milan’s PR economy
  • The Guardian
  • 2011
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Last week, as it does every April, the design world descended on Milan for the furniture fair, accompanied by thousands of journalists and an army of PRs. As the designers and other VIPs moved from champagne reception to champagne reception in chauffeur-driven cars, you could have been forgiven for thinking that they do very well for themselves, thank you. But on the 50th anniversary of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, what better time to reveal that the vast majority of them can barely pay the rent? Edgar Allan Poe might have been thinking of the Milan furniture fair when he wrote, “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream”.

In the endless exhibition halls at the Rho fairgrounds, 2,700 furniture brands exhibited their wares over half a million square metres. Many of these lamps, chairs and tables are prototypes produced by designers for free in the hope they will make their money back in royalties. Only the lucky few ever do. I spoke to one young designer who has five items in production with a respected Italian manufacturer – no small achievement. “My royalty cheque last year came to €600,” he said. “Half a month’s rent.”

It is not uncommon for manufacturers to commission exciting young talents to populate their exhibition stands with eye-catching pieces that never hit the market. They may be widely published, win awards and earn the brand a reputation for innovation – and still not go into production. In that case, the designer won’t make a penny. Most of the time they don’t even get advances. “Ah, but think of the exposure, the PR value,” the manufacturers argue. But without ample remuneration, designers will keep passing their lack of earnings down the food chain to their unpaid interns. As the British designer Ilse Crawford puts it: “Designers often end up being voluntary workers for millionaires.”

The trouble is that the royalty system was introduced in the 1950s, when Italy was still the furniture manufacturer to the world. In those days, the risks of a royalty-only payment were worth taking. With an entire country to modernise and a rising middle class, a piece of modern design could shift hundreds of thousands of units. But with the advent of cheap manufacturing in China and budget retailers such as Ikea, Italian furniture is now a luxury industry. Not only do they sell less, there’s more competition. And yet no up-and-coming designer would dream of turning down an opportunity from a manufacturer, because there are hundreds of others waiting to take their place if they do.

A decade ago, the idea that manufacturers could pay their designers in PR was still credible. A mogul such as Giulio Cappellini could launch the careers of a Jasper Morrison or Marc Newson in the 80s, or the Bouroullec brothers in the 90s, simply by giving them the nod. These days, there is so much emerging talent that companies flit from one hot young designer to the next on a yearly basis. In the fashion-driven novelties market, product cycles are becoming shorter and shorter – another reason why the royalty system (the designer gets 3% of the wholesale price) doesn’t pay off. Eero Saarinen, designer of the classic Tulip chairs for Knoll in the 1950s, made only five chairs in his career, and all are still in production. The Munich-based superstar Konstantin Grcic can boast that many this year alone (if you include a stool and a sofa).

It is no wonder that designers see what they exhibit in Milan as marketing – what Mailer called “advertisements for myself” – in the hope that exposure will lead to a job designing an interior, or a bathroom tile, or if they’re lucky a limited-edition gallery piece. Because none of this is sustainable – not financially, let alone environmentally – and the facts of the matter seemed to hit home this year. If 2010 will be remembered as the time the Salone’s attendance was decimated by an Icelandic volcano, 2011 was the year journalists quizzed manufacturers about their payment structures, posting whatever they could dig up on Twitter.

Milan may be the annual blowout of a multibillion pound industry, but it’s a mirage, and not just for the designers. The embossed invitations of lavish parties are often fig leaves over the manufacturers’ own awkward finances. But let’s not forget that it’s also a major cultural event, and there were artefacts worth mentioning. Londoners Barber Osgerby produced a chair for Vitra that wasn’t just about styling. The Tip Ton has two seating positions, one tipped forward for upright working and the other tipped back for a more relaxed posture. Designed specifically for schools, this stackable, durable chair might have graced classrooms across the country before the government’s axe came down on the Building Schools for the Future programme.

It was also good to see the Bouroullecs’ Aim Lamp go into production with Flos. These vine-like spotlights began life as a limited-edition piece for Galerie Kreo in Paris, and while the industry has sometimes viewed gallery pieces as extravagances, for once the argument that they are pre-production experiments turned out to be true. Similarly, I was surprised to see a 1970s classic by the 80-year-old Alessandro Mendini revived by Magis. His Proust Armchair, a rococo heap daubed in pointillist brushstrokes, was an icon of postmodernism, and here it is reincarnated as an industrial plastic chair.

Beyond the fair, among the hundreds of fringe events across the city, a pair of far more youthful Italians were garnering attention. The Botanica collection by Formafantasma, who are actually based in the Netherlands, was a definite highlight. Their installation at the Spazio Rossana Orlandi showed an extraordinary series of vases and other objects whose pretext was that the age of oil-derived plastics had never happened. Made of plant-based polymers and odd materials such as bois durci (a 19th-century recipe of sawdust mixed with animal blood), the collection evoked a lost Amazonian civilisation discovered by Darwinian anthropologists. It’s an atavistic eco-fantasy, done with flair.

Finally, the show by recent graduates of the Design Academy Eindhoven demonstrated again that no other school consistently produces such imaginative work. Massoud Hassani’s wind-powered anti-landmine ball was inspired by his native Afghanistan, a country rumoured to have more mines than people. Even more impressive was Dirk van der Kooij’s use of a retired production robot from a Chinese factory to print out chairs made of plastic from old fridges.

Eindhoven’s students are going places. The question is: where? As design schools churn out ever more graduates, their future looks ever more precarious. There are some important lessons to be learned, though. Today’s designers need to be tougher business people; they need to negotiate harder and hold on to their copyright. But if there is one moral to this story it is this: design is a way of life that so many people want to participate in, they’ll do it whether or not there’s a viable living in it. Even some of the manufacturers are haemorrhaging cash to hold on to this.

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