December design news: gingerbread modernism and mid-century man caves (2024)

Sometimes the imagination and skill involved in construction can blow your mind. It’s a privilege to be able to feature two such achievements this month in the news section – the Chapel of Sound in China which looks like a rock dropped from space and a Gingerbread City made to raise money for the UK’s Museum of Architecture.

As well as the grand statement designs, we also have thoughtful construction with the individual in mind in the form of a library designed to help you connect with your emotions and a previously unseen installation from Ettore Sottsass, founder of the Memphis movement, designed to give personal space.

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China is in the middle of a building boom that has made it the largest construction site in human history. With almost half of the world’s building work set to take place in this one country in the coming decade, the architects and builders who shape this skyline are paramount. A new generation of local architects is now replacing western names as the creators of China’s most prestigious buildings. Not only is their fresh vision gaining international recognition but their more sustainable practice is also helping the planet. An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China, showcases this generation’s commitment to social and environmental sustainability – featuring work by Pritzker Prize winning Amateur Architecture and Aga Khan Award laureate Zhang Ke and his studio ZAO/Standard.

Reinventing Cultural Architecture, a book covering the work of Open Studio, is published this spring. This Beijing-based studio has just completed work on a concert hall called the Chapel of Sound situated in the shadow of the Great Wall. Open Studio strives for harmony with the environment in design and materials used. Its best-known work is the UCCA Dune Art Museum built into a beach in Bohai Bay. The Chapel of Sound is similarly elemental, built like a rock and open to the elements. Open Studio was founded by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing and their comments on their new work seem to sum up the new Chinese ethos: “We are at a time when the question of our relationship with nature as human beings is more acute than ever. Can we be humble enough to hear what nature is murmuring to us? We wanted to create something different, something meaningful.”

Today we’re familiar with the idea of a man cave as a place for the male of the species to get some precious alone time. The same concept was present in mid-Century, post-modern Italian design – albeit in a rather more stylish incarnation.

In the mid-1960s, the architect, designer and Memphis Group founder Ettore Sottsass built Sala Sottsass, a “room within a room”, in Casa Lana, the Milan home of a typographer friend. Sottsass was intrigued by the relationship between men, their needs and their rituals, and the inhabited space. So Sala Sottsass consisted of a wooden structure with sofas arranged so that they formed a “protected space” to sit, chat and listen to music.

The project has never been seen by the public but now the Sottsass Archive has meticulously rebuilt it in Triennale di Milano, the design and art museum in Lombardy. To accompany the installation, the Triennale has organised three exhibitions throughout 2022 that will look deeper into the world of Sottsass.

In the meantime, any men shuffling off to the spare room for some peace and quiet this Christmas might like to gaze on this “little piazza… where one can move and meet” as Sottsass himself put it in 1967 – and dream.

For more information on the upcoming Sottsass exhibitions, check the Triennale website

Skip Gallery was founded in 2017 by curators and artists Lee Baker and Catherine Borowski in, yes, a skip. “We couldn’t find anywhere to show our work, but Borowski came up with the bright idea of dropping a skip as a gallery into a parking space and our bonkers project was born,” says Baker. For Christmas 2021, Skip Gallery brings you the Feelings Library. This project is a collaboration with architects Caukin Studio and therapy service Self Space. The Library is a strange, slightly forbidding thatched pop-up sanctuary – built in a skip, of course – in Spitalfields market, London. Inside is a cosy reading room where you can learn about emotions from the library shelves of journals provided by Self Space.

“This was two years in the making, and we are over the moon to launch Feelings Library. We feel strongly about creating opportunities for artists and designers and showcasing creativity in public spaces.”

With mental health problems on the rise during the ongoing Covid pandemic, let’s hope the Feelings Library helps someone to have a happy Christmas.

For more information, visit feelingslibrary.com

German American Florine Stettheimer was one of the 20th century’s most significant feminist artists. Marcel Duchamp helped stage a retrospective of her work two years after her death in 1944, and Andy Warhol said she was his favourite artist. Stettheimer was celebrated for her poetry, costume design and theatre sets, but perhaps one of her most significant accomplishments was a painting which has been described as the first nude self-portrait from the perspective of the “female gaze”, completed back in 1915.

After spending her early years in Europe, she and her sisters, Carrie and Ettie, helped introduce the modernist movement to America and supported the Harlem Renaissance through their Bryant Park salon in New York. The Stetties, as the sisters were known, each had their own creative pursuit. Carrie created a doll-house containing an art collection of miniatures donated by their artist friends. Ettie wrote feminist novels under the pseudonym Henrie Waste. Florine made overtly political artworks long before it was the norm – addressing gender identity, segregation and women’s rights, as well as the burgeoning avant garde scene in her native New York.

A new biography by art historian Barbara Bloemink focuses on these more political works and brings new focus to the innovative artist, reminding the world that behind her faux-naive style – so beloved by Warhol – was an intelligent woman, way ahead of her time.

Florine Stettheimer, a Biography (Hirmer Publishing/ University of Chicago Press,) is published 24 January

Following on from the release of 2020’s gingerbread Ikea furniture, new festive edible design projects have materialised this year. American designer Kelly Wearstler made a limited edition California Modern-style gingerbread house with LA food company Flamingo Estate, with all proceeds going to Create Structure, a charity that helps communities rebuild with sustainable housing after natural disasters.

Swedish studio Ulf Mejergren Architects (UMA) decided to see how they could use gingerbread biscuits and created an edible hut out of the festive cookies. Miller beer released a limited edition gingerbread dive bar kit which has sadly now sold out. If you want to admire the very best in biscuit construction, then go to the London Museum of Architecture. They hold an annual exhibition where designers and engineers create a gingerbread metropolis. The show raises money to support the museum’s charity.

The Gingerbread City show runs until 9 January 2022 at the Museum of Architecture, 6-7 Motcomb Street, Belgravia, London

This year a World Economic Forum report found that the fashion industry supply chain is the third biggest source of pollution on the planet. A big contributor to this is synthetic fibre production which uses fossil fuels. The development of biomaterials to replace these nonrenewable fabrics is a key area of research in fashion and, this month, Algiknit revealed its new kelp-derived yarn and plans to start collaborations with fashion brands in 2022. AlgiKnit has spent four years developing technology to produce yarns using seaweed on a commercial scale.

Kelp is renewable, regenerative and can be used to make versatile, durable threads for shoes and clothes which has a much lower carbon footprint than conventional yarn, especially synthetics.

“We know consumers want more cost-competitive, environmentally-sound options that perform as well as conventional materials,” said Aaron Nesser, co-founder and chief technology officer of AlgiKnit. “The yarn we’re producing today has the look and feel of natural fibres, plus all the makings of a no-compromise conscious material.”