Weiss Magazine Development: Three

WEISSWelcome To The Inaugural Issue Of

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Weiss magazine celebrates minimalism and features the latest minimalist design, including Technology, Architecture, Fashion, Art, Graphic Design and Music. Each issue features an interview from current designers, past icons and emerging talent. Weiss offers a stimulating world of striking design and simplicity. Weiss stands for everything minimal.

What is Weiss /

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2010 LEEDS ART PUBLICTIONS LTD -Weiss magazine is published quarterly by Leeds Art Publications Ltd, Manor Mills, Ingram Street, Leeds, LS119BR. Printed in the UK by James (Digital Dungeon) Ltd. Published 4 times a year. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. All prices correct at the time of press, but subject to change.

Editor_Ross Stanton

SUBSCRIPTION DETAILS-The subscription rates for Weiss magazine for one year (4 issues including postage) are: UK £47.88. Overseas Airmail per year: 99 euros to EU, £80 rest of europe and £119 to the rest of the world. Subscriptions hotline: 0844 876 248, open Monday to friday 8am - 9.30pm; Saturday 8am - 4pm. Manage your sunscription 24 hours a day by logging into your account at WeissMagazine.com.

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Contents

TechnologyProducts previews from WeissMusicProducts previews from WeissFurnitureProducts previews from WeissArchitectureProducts previews from WeissIconsProducts previews from WeissFashionProducts previews from WeissDesignProducts previews from WeissInterviewProducts previews from WeissArtProducts previews from Weiss

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01_Atrium House

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Technology

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01_D-Premier02_RKNL Audio

Minimalist design is beatiful. The D-Premier is a wall mountable unit designed by a French audio company called Devialet. This Amp packs 480 watts of power and connects to a number of multimedia devices via HDMI, RS-232 and wifi.Plenty of hifi equipment aimed at the top-end of the market, particularly amplifiers, look like they want you to know they exist; so much so that you can’t fail to notice. They can be monstrous behemoths, sometimes to fit all the required components in, but mainly to fuel their ego. They have that look about them. The look that says: ‘Turn me up to 3 and I will rip your face off.’

The RKNL Audio is a media console designed by Dutch designer Ronald Knol. It hides those ugly cables neatly in a double back case, and it has an open space and two storage drawers for other electronic components.

www.odesi.nlwww.devialet.com

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Emi Schenkelback has designed this masterpice of a kettle design combining three basic shapes: Triangle, Square and Circle.“I wanted to keep a clean and elegant design, which will allow this kettle to look natural with any kitchen.” The visual look of the kettle is different according to the viewing angle, which keeps making it interesting the more you observe it.

The Holga has a cheap plastic lens, an even cheaper light-leaking plastic body, settings so sparse that they’re almost superfluous and, as with all film cameras, delayed gratification in the form of the need for chemical processing before you can see your blurred, distorted photographs. However it is beatifuly minimal.

www.braun.comwww.holga.st

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Music_Steve Bug

We‘re living in strange times,‘ Steve remarks, while discussing the current so-called crisis‘ that has emerged between Vinyl and Digital platforms. Yet, he remains optimistic. A dedicated disciple of vinyl, Bug visits his favourite record shop in Berlin, Melting Point, every week without fail. Although he has famously utilised digital DJ tools to perform in clubs for some time now, Steve still takes the time to record his records as audio files to take on theroad, preserving the unique ‚mastered‘ qualities of the original pressings. Its details like this that contribute to his position at the top of his game!

Tastefully blurring the boundaries between restrained, deeplyunderground roots and strikingly versatile, hands-in-the-air moments, Steve‘s DJ sets have become some of the most sought after at the world‘s top important clubs and festivals and industry gatherings. He lists such parties as ‚The Sunday School for Degenerates‘, famously held every year at the Miami Winter Music Conference, as one of the highlights of the year. His alltime favourite German festival, Fusion, which he performs at every year, kicking off the party with the honorary opening set, also holds a place close to his heart

Germany‘s true master of the electronic past, present and future, Steve Bug is an artist through and through, bristling with excitement, endearing energy and

honesty, talking passionately about his career and his upcoming projects. As always he‘s firmly locked in the studio, and after the huge effort lovingly expressed through his new album ‚Collaboratory‘, Steve has somewhat morphed into a new, more relaxed and free-rolling producer. Stay tuned for some fresh new projects where the barriers and expectations might be lifted once again, opening up to his pure,undying musical intuition.

www.pokerflat-recordings.com

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Furniture_Bucefalo

Simple and beautiful,Meet Bucefalo, a dauntingly dark sofa by Italian designer Emanuele Canova. Inspiration came from the figure of Bucefalo, a legendary black horse which only Alexander The Great succeeded to tame.

The sofa has multiple functions: it allows you to sit, to lounge, and to store your books or design objects Very elegant and lightweight. Perfect for an industrial warehouse loft converted This is gorgeous and I truly appreciate this type of furniture, however, my concerns is what happens if I read books with coloured covers ?

www.emanuelecanova.it

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Meet Bucefalo, a dauntingly dark sofa by Italian designer Emanuele Canova. Inspiration came from the figure of Buce-falo, a legendary black horse which only Alexander The Great succeeded to tame.

The sofa has multiple functions: it allows you to sit, to lounge, and to store your books or design objects (thx, Lorenzo). …Very elegant and lightweight. Perfect for an industrial warehouse loft con-verted…This is gorgeous and I truly appreciate this type of furniture, however, my con-cerns is… what happens if I read books with coloured covers ?Simple and beautiful for sure, yet I won-der if it really is minimalistic

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Ion Ander Beloki‘s studio reminds me of these pencil cases I had as a child. The kind where it looks just like a regular rectangular brick case, but inside, had many different compartments, side openings, secret panels, and missiles of course. Well, the Spanish window designer, the brainchild behind ja! studio, designed this amazingly modular studio space, named Caja (box in Spanish), is in the heart of Basque Country. There’s hiding closets of libraries, extendible carts holding couches and work desks, hiding toilets and office space, and all still very functional it seems. Ion Ander comments,It is a work area that can be adapted to the different requirements of the project. Its distribution embodies the suggested program: a convertible and unexpected space created with three materials: American oak wood, black MDF and white MDF, leaving the panel’s edges free of any finishing or application details.

www.ja-studio.com

Architecture_Ja Studio

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01_Kitchen02_Living Room03_Bathroom04_Living Room

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Architecture_Atrium House

What’s up with all the white and natural light? The inconsistency of natural light and its endless shades against a white wall is what makes it so interesting. The House in Komae, Japan, designed by architect Makoto Yamaguchi, is mostly lit by natural light.

The house in Komae received an award of merit in lighting design by the 25th Annual International Association of Light-ing Designers (IALD) in 2008. The house includes several courtyards, curved walls and a basement. The interior space is almost free of fixtures. The illuminated courtyards and curved walls seem to work as lighting fixtures. They direct the natural light into the interior and deepen the volume of the rooms.

This house can get transformed by the changes in light and the suppression of color. Sometimes I am suspicious of

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color but not white. Can white be aggres-sively white? There are 50 different color shades of white,” says John Pawson. And you could probably only see them in an empty room. For John Pawson, architec-ture is about reduction.

www.fransilvestrenavarro.com

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It’s January, and John Pawson is sitting in his offices just behind King’s Cross station in London, fretting. He is worrying about what to call his exhibition at the Design Museum, a celebration of his first 30 years as an architect. ‘He doesn’t want to call it a retrospective,’ teases Alison Morris, his staff writer for the past decade and the author of a book published to coincide with the exhibition. ‘It makes him feel old.’ Actually, he doesn’t want to call it anything at all, preferring the appropriately minimal ‘John Pawson at the Design Museum’, but they want something snappier and soon. ‘I’m very stressed about it,’ he says. There’s also the question of the structure he wants to build in the museum, so that people can experience actually being inside one of his spaces. He initially wanted to make this out of a huge block of smooth white Kent chalk.‘It’s so beautiful,’ he says wistfully. ‘And not easy to build with. It would have been nice to have something in the exhibition that you can’t normally do. But it’s just too heavy, too expensive, and too time-consuming to put it in. So I’m trying to think of something else. It will be a room in which nothing happens at all. But you’ll hopefully get a feel of the things we do. Some sense of precision, light and proportion; of scale, and sensual material.’

He goes through his ideas for the rest of the show: huge, Gursky-sized architectural photographs, models, films, large samples of some of the materials he uses, information about clients who

shaped various projects. ‘It’s probably too much,’ he says. ‘But I want to satisfy people, so that when they walk around they won’t feel short-changed.’

It’s the first time we’ve met, and I’d been a bit nervous about it. Perhaps it was the slightly bossy tone of Living and Eating, the cookery book he wrote with Annie Bell, which is actually rather good if a little stern, with its lists of what you should and should not own. But mainly it’s because much as I aspire to an uncluttered, minimal lifestyle, I’m usually fighting chaos. Pawson specialises in precisely crafted, clear, light-filled spaces made in beautiful materials, uninterrupted by the minutiae of everyday life: switches, handles, knobs, kettles, even furniture. His own home is so minimal that when he showed it to some Cistercian monks whose monastery he was to design, they worried his style might be too austere for them. I’d imagined I might mess up his pristine office with my presence . Pawson turns out to be a warm, funny man who is reassuringly scatty at times, his conversation forever veering off on interesting tangents. His architectural practice has 25 employees and the same messy desks, computer monitors covered in sticky notes and bustle as any other office. ‘There was much less stuff here when we started,’ he says mournfully, while the staff within hearing range roll their eyes. There’s a lot of laughter in his office, a lot of mickey-taking of the boss. He stresses that it’s a team effort, creating a new building. ‘With architecture, it’s not

John Pawson

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one person sitting in a room struggling. Although if it works, it’s my idea. If it doesn’t, it’s theirs!’ n the early days he had a reputation for being an inflexible perfectionist, and he admits that once, when he changed his mind once too often on an art gallery project in Cork Street, London, the builder floored him. ‘Early on, for me there was only one way, one vision, and I didn’t have time to listen. Which was probably a good thing, then. But it did mean clients weren’t listened to, and I didn’t have the energy or the emotional capacity to understand that they were coming from a different place.’

He has mellowed now, and enjoys the interaction with clients, many of whom have become friends. ‘There’s so much you can learn from them. I don’t mean about architecture, but just generally.’He still admits to a bit of a temper at times, saying he fusses about the small things. ‘If it’s a big challenge, if there’s a loss in the family or somebody needs help, you don’t have any choice, you just jump in. But how you deal with soap next to the basin… I guess it’s being an imperfect perfectionist.’

Later he confesses to keeping storage units in west London, stuffed with work things he can’t bring himself to get rid of. He used to throw everything away, he explains, but then students started to enquire about his archive and he realised that some of it might be useful for reference. Although his wife, Catherine , has pointed out that 10 boxes of phone receipts are of no interest

to anyone. ‘It’s funny, for a minimalist,’ he acknowledges. ‘And I do have a guilty conscience about it, because I’m the man who’s supposed to be able to do this stuff.’

In 2002 he was involved in a serious car accident in India. A friend and client next to him in the car was killed. Pawson survived, but it was close. ‘It was so… visceral,’ he says quietly. ‘But what’s almost more frightening is the quickness with which you get over it. It took three months for the crying, the outbusts, all the physical manifestations of it to pass. And sadly only another three months to stop saying, “I’m not going to put up with this. This is my life. I’m going to sort things out.”’

I never meet Catherine, his wife of 21 years, but he talks about her and his children constantly, with a great deal of love and pride. Their son, Benedict, 19, is at university in Bristol, reading history. Caius, Pawson’s 24-year-old son with Hester van Royen, an art dealer, is in the music business, working at the indie label XL, running his own side-label there, and also managing one of his discoveries, the Mercury-nominated trio the xx. Phoebe, his stepdaughter, works at the Times. He enjoys their company, and says that hanging out with their friends, and going to see Caius’s acts play live, has made him more relaxed about his 61 years.

Sheryl Garratt

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London fashion label Unconditional is now just 8 years old and was designed by Philip Stephens, it started as a tiny capsule of luxury menswear for the Concrete Shop, in Soho, London in late 2002 and was joined by a small womens collection 2 years later. Unconditional showed on the official London Fashion Week schedule for 6 seasons, and has since moved around showing for two seasons in New York. SS11 was shown back in London.Unconditional is said to be very London in its attitude, yet with an ease and simplicity sometimes described as quite American: the collection is a winning combination of the laidback and the edgy’. The backbone of each collection is a unique range of ‘luxury basics’ with an overlay of more special pieces; usually relaxed in style, Unconditional is often mildly androgynous. Unconditional has established its own feeling of a modern elegance with a dash of rock’n’roll – pieces that are uncompromising in their attention to detail with high quality fabrications, always favoring pure, natural, ethically produced fabrics and yarns. Clean, strong silhouettes that are always intentionally quite sexy, often balancing a signature of drape set against structured, architectural tailoring.

www.unconditional.uk.com

Fashion_Unconditional

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Fashion_Claud Maus

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The Claude Maus name was born as a pseudonym for Melbourne-based fine artist and graphic designer, Rob Maniscalco. In 2000 Claude Maus evolved into a fashion label and following the first collection, was quickly established as one of Australia’s most dynamic and challenging newcomers.

In 2001 saw Claude Maus take out the Mercedes Australian Fashion Week Start-Up program; this accolade was followed up with being awarded Designer of the Year in both men’s and women’s at the 2003 L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. This year Claude Maus presented its first International Collection with Showroom Romeo.

www.claudemaus.com

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Fashion_Karl Lagerfeld

Modern is for today,” Karl Lagerfeld said before his show, emphasizing his in-the-moment view of fashion, but the collection he showed under his own name impressively encompassed past, present, and future. Though the designer also featured a swingy A-line shape (in winter white, say, with silver piping and zip), the silhouette that mattered was streamlined to the nth. It was composed of a rigorously tailored jacket, its front folded back to create a kind of angular peplum, worn over a second-skin skirt-and-pants combination in a new kind of patent leather that had a flawless vinyl finish (in brown, it looked unsettlingly like chocolate). The patent was also used to line lapels or those folded jacket fronts. But equally, many of Lagerfeld’s details harked back to history, like the corset detailing on one jacket or the buttons that ran up to the elbow on the sleeve of another. One navy jacket with a little stand-up collar was piped in red like a vintage military uniform. The puff of

black netting on a one-shouldered silk dress added a fin de siècle touch, of old Vienna perhaps. The beaded or pleated chiffons that made up the finale had that same feel, even when worn over patent pants. The bands that held hair high off the forehead added inches of height to models who were already towering. Backstage, they set Lagerfeld to thinking about the Na’vi and Avatar and maybe even a collection of KL in 3-D eyewear.

Tim Blanks

www.karllagerfeld.com

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Emil Ruder is a Swiss typographer and graphic designer. Ruder lived between1914-1970 and played an important role in the development and dissemination of the Swiss Style.“Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing.”

He has helped, together with Armin Hofmann, to found the Schule für Gestaltung, Basel - Basel School of Design He was known for encouraging his students to be more concerned with precision, proportions and the role of legibility and communication with type.

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Design_Emil Ruder

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Continuing on our minimalist movie poster tip, it would be amiss of us not to mention Olly Moss and his Eight Films in Black and Red series.

There’s not much more to say that hasn’t already said, expect that The Great Dictator, Die Hard, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Deer Hunter are my favourites. The artwork speaks more than a 1000 words if not minutes. Consequentially, like all film preview trailers, they probably give away too much of what happens.

www.jamesbolton.co.uk

Design_ James Bolton

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Every company makes the same design; with dark brown wooden housings. They called that in Germany Gelsenkirchener Baroque. It’s always a compliment when some products we have designed become a nickname. Like, the snow-white cover. Nobody knows exactly where it’s coming from. Comes from the competition or it comes from the inside. But the first thing, was not only the cover, that was only the base, the main base, in method.

I was influenced by my grandfather who was a carpenter. And he was a specialist for surfaces, and I learned that from him but I had in mind to study architecture. And after that I finished my studies. That was a time where, in Germany I was massive, so the things come back from the, Untied States, for example, with architecture, things from Mies Van der Rohe, from Gropius, from Marcel Breuer; all these things come and it was for us just to look in a new brave world.

Somebody said that there is an announcement in the newspaper, that there is a company called Braun. And then I get an answer from Erwin Braun. I met him first and he taught me about his ideas. His vision was to change the product line, that was at this time unbelievable. Totally new approach in, as a company. But that was thinking behind that, that was not only concentrated on design, design was one part. He organised in the company the possibilities that people could have gymnastics. It’s because, even secretaries

doing always the same thing the whole day, so they need something to stay healthy.

The first exhibition that the new design of the radios was very successful also, the media and everything was, surprised about that and that, so, Braun becomes more known. So nobody had this idea, that by the help of design you also could be very successful.

I did it, because I became a teacher at the academy of fine arts in Hamburg. So it was necessary to do something which you could tell the students, and could tell to the press and also to keep together, our own, behaviour in the design department at Braun. The last one was: as little design as possible which is similar: less is better.

I hate everything what is driven by fashion. From the beginning it was hating, in the sixties the American way of styling. Especially the cars. They changed their styling things every two years to sell new ones. Which has nothing to do with good design. So end of the sixties, the whole programme was looking like that.

In the beginning was the first writing machines, it was also monochrome. Why should it not be in a colour. That is, it’s a difference between a kitchen machine which stays permanently in the kitchen and has to be in the background, like, that was Erwin Braun he formulatedthat: “Our products

Icon_Dieter Rams

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should look like and English butler: be there, when you need them, but in the background when you don’t need them. So it depends on the product, if you make a colour or not.I was involved always still in the field of furniture. And then I met Otto Zapf and Niels Vitsœ. I had in my mind, always thinking not on one appliance alone, always thinking: how can I add something. And especially developing furniture that people could change there, they could add something after using them awhile.

Somebody’s once written: ” I’m the designers’ designer”and I take that as a compliment and I also take it as a compliment that Jonathan Ive is taking some of the ideas I had in the sixties and that it for me again the best compliment you can get as a designer.They called it later the first Walkman, because it was the first one, you could have it with earphones and walking with it. It also was designed as a system, ja, it has the separate radios, they made an exhibition with the title “less but better” and they made this poster.

I think that design has a great, great responsibility for the future. I’m always optimistic, as a designer we have to be an optimist. Otherwise you should not stay as a designer anymore.

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Moscow based corporate identity designer and freelance illustrator Maria Zaikina creates landscape art titled Landschaft Mit Haus Maria is inspired by travelling around the world with her camera and Wim Wenders‘ movie Alice in the Cities, in which the mean character Alice is searching the cities of Germany for her grandmother, whose name and address Alice can’t remember. The subject of journey is very close to her she says.“Melancholic contemplation during a journey is evoked by landscapes drifting past the window, where details merge into stripes and colours. The scenery floats past in front of our eyes, changing our mood or remaining as a background for thought, leaving perhaps just an implicit impression in the memory. Our eyes glimpse a house standing lonely amongst the fields.”_

Art_Maria Zaikina

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Kevin Saint Grey is a photographer with a minimalist aesthetic. He says: Painters decide what to put into a work. Photographers decide what to leave out.Like all photographers influenced by his surroundings, his subjects center around urban architecture, landscape, and motion, but never in a straightforward way. The images he creates in his mind’s eye transcend traditional concepts and expectations. With his extraordinary vision, his minimalist aesthetic, and his signature gradients he creates photographs of great intensity and beautyphotos that engage the mind and the senses; that are distinct, dynamic, and unexpected. Kevin Saint Grey is a photographer with a minimalist aesthetic. He says:Painters decide what to put into a work. Photographers decide what to leave out. Like all photographers influenced by his surroundings, his subjects center around urban architecture, landscape, and motion, but never in a straightforward way. The images he creates in his mind’s eye transcend traditional concepts

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Index:

Music-

www.cadenzarecords.comwww.pokerflat-recordings.comwww.wolflambmusic.comwww.desolatmusicgroup.com

Fashion-

www.bassike.comwww.borisbidjansaberi.comwww.chroniclesofnever.comwww.oki-ni.comwww.hbyharris.comwww.jilsander.comwww.longclothing.comwww.markjacobs.comwww.mrhareshoes.comwww.mykita.comwww.neilbarrett.comwww.odeur.seportmonnaie.co.ukwww.rafsimons.comwww.stoneisland.co.ukwww.tomkrom.co.ukwww.timex.comwww. tsovet.comwww.uboatwatch.itwww.uniformwares.comwww.unconditional.uk.com

Design-

www.bandwstudio.co.ukwww.benditagloria.comwww.bibliothequedesign.comwww.bunchdesign.comwww.buroreng.nlwww.bvd.sewww.danbiddulph.comwww.gavillet-rust.comwww.heystudio.eswww.hort.org.ukwww.huntstudio.comwww.jetset.nwww.kendeegan.comwww.madebysawdust.co.ukwww.qubik.comwww.rawdesignstudio.co.ukwww.rgbstudio.co.ukwww.studiovonbirken.comwww.theconsult.comwww.thelondonbranch.comwww.theluxuryofprotest.comwww.transferstudio.co.ukwww.typokabi.net

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Bibliography:

Websites-

www.anotherfaceinthecrowd.comwww.chairwhore.comwww.iainclaridge.co.ukwww.midcenturymodernist.comwww.minimalissimo.comwww.needswants.comwww.newdandyism.comwww.otto-otto.comwww.stylepark.comwww.svpply.comwww.swisscheeseandbullets.com

Special Thanks-