I picked up a neat little white coffee/espresso cup with a gold rim and a gold Mosasauridae (a type of dynosaur)printed on one side. I find these sorts of tourist curiousities irresistable some times not because they might be worth something (this clearly is not, though the design is undeniably clean and appealing), but rather because I can't fathom Maastricht, Holland's connection to Mosasauridae.
If anyone familiar with Maastricht can explain this curiosity, I would be greatly relieved. 🙂
Why, in Maastricht, Holland, on the Meuse River (Meuse
Hi DC.
I thought this was an obvious...The first discovery of a fossiled mosasaur (1780, before any dinosaur was found) by workers in a limestone mine was made under land close to Maastricht, that was owned by Maastricht's local autorities. The man credited for the finding is Dr. Hoffman, a Maastricht surgeon, but he was not the one that found the fossils, he was a known local expert. The Maastricht lime stone banks of the Maas (Meuse in Belgium and France)) river were known for fossils and a particular period of the 6 million years long Cretaceous (the equivalent of two days for those who believe in creation) is called Maastrichtian because of it.
That particular first one ended up in Paris (where I got the story) probably as a result of the Napoleon wars.
The Mosa (Latin for Maar or Meuse)espresso cup by the way is designed by Pieter Stockman, a very talented and proliferic Belgian designer....who should be on the designers index of DA.
http://www.pietstockmans.com
It is an extremely neat little cup...
I just drank from it this morning and my son, who is a dynosauraholic, is green with envy. He will of course quickly make it his. 🙂
It really is a beautiful and usseful design of a cup.
Shall we start the KoenCyclopedia; that is the question--not to be or not to be. 🙂
Koen, Stockmans is fascinating...
Talk about a man who straddles the art vs. design frontier. I find his art and his artifacts a quite logical extention of design. Why not design art the same form language one uses to design cups and saucers. He is truly an interior designer, rather than an interior decorator. It would be fascinating to see an interior designed entirely by Stockmans. What is so cool about this is that he is extending design into the interior of a house or office, the way Frank Lloyd Wright extended architecture into the interior of a house or architecture. To be honest, I would be very excited by this man daring to take on a building commission the way you have. I think this is a wonderfully underexplored dimension of design. Use a form language and aesthetic sensibility of an industrial designer not only on the toaster, coffee pot and so forth, but on the art and architecture of a place.
Do you recall when I said I would be fascinated to see the form language and design philosophy of your ceramic pieces carried over into a building? This is what I am talking about again.
Put another way, I think in the long run that it may be more sensible to design a building and the furniture and appliances and vases and the decorative art in it with the design philosophy and sensibility of an exceptional industrial designer like you or Stockmans, than it would be to generalize the principles of architecture to all of the above.
Now, I know one may not wish to generalize at all and leave all the methodologies and sensibilities of all these different disciplines (architecture, industrial design, interior design, decorative arts, landscape architecture, etc.) separate.
But I sense that our living spaces/environments could benefit greatly from a more profound and transcendent integration of these presently discrete disciplines.
Persons are often trying to blur the boundaries among these disciplines.
Stockmans, the architect, has combined designing products with designing decortive arts.
Wright architected buildings and architected furntiture.
If you are still working on the music hall, or if you are not, what do you say you take one more building commission and "industrially design" the whole goddamn thing. I'm not looking for an egomaniacal, virtuoso performance here. You could sub contract out various parts of the building to other designers with a shared sensibility about design. But th idea is: Industrially design everything--the appliances, lamps, vases, carpets, building, landscape, and all the decorative art.
pt. 2
I know one can make a case that some of the current attempts at manufactured housing is an attempt at this, but they are really only industrially designing the building in a Bauhaus/Eames form language and a bit of the built-in furniture, too. Frankly, I am not really interested in you industrially designing a building, so it can be built in a factory and mass produced, though I think my idea lends itself to that sort of path, also.
What I am interested in is creating a living space/environment with a unity of design method and sensibility, a better environment that lives and works better and more usefully than buildings that are at best an orchestration of a hodge-podge of methodologies and sensibilities.
I'm not saying I want my world to look and work and feel like a Sunbeam toaster; i.e., I don't want it to be a machine for living in. But I would like it all to be one of your ceramics for living in, or one of Stockmans' minimalist ceramics for living in. Do you understand what I am trying to get at here?
The only designer I can think of who has really come close to doing what I am talking about is Phillipe Starck when he designed a yacht, or Raymond Loewy when he designed a streamlined train and the interiors and light fixtures and ceramic plates in a train. But the problem with these attempts is that trains and yachts are such technologically complex and narrowly purposeful items that the designers more or less had to work with the space the engineers gave them; that is, they were limited to being interior designers and exterior stylists.
I'd like to see the likes of you or Stockmans think through a house top to bottom, then think through the furniture, then think through appliances and plates all the way to the decortive arts. Again, it is not that you have to do it all yourself (I don't see how anyone could. It would be too big of a job), but rather that you have to orchestrate the industrial design of a building from the inside out.
pt. 3
Perhaps what I am talking about could be begun in a virtual design project kind of like the one undertaken here at DA previously with the vase. Perhaps it could be cursory in details and long on concepts. Wouldn't it be fun to design a hypothetical building and everything in and around it with industrial design principles and see what came out?
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