COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Dook; Jan Ras; Paris Brummer; Warren Heath; Greg Cox

From Brutalist masterpieces to modernist marvels, these homes channel the spirit of the past in bold, unexpected ways. Whether it’s sculptural forms, vintage palettes or era-defining details, each space is a celebration of retro design at its most striking.

Linksfield Ridge Home

Polish-born architect Frank Jarrett left a rather eclectic collection of landmarks across the city of Johannesburg, his works ranging from the offices of Chancellor House – the original home of Mandela and Tambo Attorneys – to the slightly less discreet Gold Reef City theme park development. In 1951, Jarrett was commissioned to build a private residence on the Linksfield Ridge for Greek timber merchant Manoussos Broulidakis, who clad the interior of the modern stone, brick and terrazzo home in glowing floor-to-ceiling wood. Thankfully, many of these features remain today. The front door is Burmese teak, the floors are covered in gleaming parquet. But perhaps most breathtaking of all are the richly varnished panels of sandblasted pine that line the eastern wall between the living area and the kitchen, and which enclose a Bond-worthy staircase leading up to the home’s bedrooms.

Read the full story on this Linksfield Ridge Home.

Modernist Home in Bishopscourt

Keurbos manages the clever trick of being both conspicuous and concealed. It stands out in the architectural sense: this Gawie Fagan-designed Modernist bungalow-style home bears no resemblance to the Neo-Georgian squares and contemporary concrete rectangles that occupy Bishopscourt’s streets. And it’s hidden both physically and conceptually: built on a steep slope, Keurbos sits well below street level on a verdant hillside. It’s a discrete structure in a discrete location, accessed via a descending panhandle driveway that requires very specific directional instructions to find. If you know anything about the late architect’s approach, you’ll know that’s all intentional. This giant of South African Modernist architecture had sense of place as one of his key design principles, and his structures all show a sensitivity to the landscape – Keurbos nestles into the hill, rather than dominating it.

Read the full story on this Modernist home in Bishopscourt.

Minimalist Joburg Home

Edoardo Villa’s journey had been a long one: from Italy to South Africa as a prisoner of war, and from classic realism to abstract modernism as an artist. After his release, he chose to stay on in Johannesburg and for a time lived and worked at the home of artist Douglas Portway in Kew, a suburb on the eastern fringe of the city.

Villa soon became a prominent figure in the local art world and in the great surge of creative innovation that lit up the middle of the century. He was able to buy the Portway house in 1959, and in 1968 commissioned Ian McLennan to design a house for him on the same property, giving him no brief and a very small budget.

Read the full story on this minimalist Joburg home.

Fresnaye Family Home

There’s something altogether contrary about designing a Fresnaye house that presides over the Atlantic Seaboard without giving a second thought to the views. But when it comes to this dazzling home, there’s no desire to follow the rules. You’ll find soft curves where you’d expect sharp right angles and, while you’re cleverly protected from onlookers, glass-walled neighbours find themselves exposed.

“They didn’t care a damn for the views,” says architect Robert Silke of Robert Silke & Partners about the homeowners’ brief. “It had to be a functioning family home – that it has views is a bonus.” But take one glance at the bleached-white, three-storey structure that looks a little like an abstract jigsaw puzzle from the outside and you know there’s more to this house than just a family home. Robert insists that “it’s a pragmatic family home, not a showpiece house”, then a moment later gleefully proclaims, “It’s a bit like a spaceship arrived in Fresnaye.” Then again, this architect has quite the contrary reputation, shunning the dominant vernacular for edgy takes on Art Deco and early minimalism that feel at once retro and fresh.

Read the full story on this Fresnaye family home.

Waterkloof House

A few years ago, when a handful of curious architects made a pilgrimage to this spectacular 1970s house in Waterkloof in Pretoria, one described it as a “time capsule”. “We’ve lived here for 48 years,” says its owner. As a result, the architecture and the furniture are perfectly preserved, looking just as she envisioned them nearly five decades ago. Everything has been meticulously maintained, and the house has an almost otherworldly, hallucinogenic quality that leaves you feeling transported in time.

It was designed by architect Petrus Paulus (Piet) van den Berg, a Pretoria architect who, while prolific, hugely versatile and tirelessly experimental over his 50-year career, seems little known outside of local architectural circles. “Piet was a great friend of ours,” says the owner. She and her husband simply wanted “something different” when they engaged him to do the design.

Read the full story on this Waterkloof House.

Art Deco Hotel

You can’t miss Tropicana – at least on paper. As you can see here, the striking hotel is a dreamy piece of confection that you could as much take a bite out of as step inside. Among its mostly monochromatic neighbours, the light-blue-and-pink Tropicana looks like it’s crowned by a permanent rainbow and staffed by My Little Ponies. Except it’s deceptively hard to spot in the flesh.

Rising from a small triangular plot of land where Sea Point’s Kloof Road forks, Tropicana’s pale blue-meets-pastel pink manages a trick of hiding in plain sight. Along with its curves and soft lines, the blue half of its exterior merges with the sea and sky for most of the day, while the pink folds it into the blush of sunset. Robert Silke, founder of Robert Silke & Partners – the architects of the building – describes it as having “an almost holographic appearance, like you’re not sure if it’s pink or blue or silver”. It’s genius… and a fortuitous stroke of luck

Read the full story on Tropicana.

Renovated Waterkloof Home

The five-bedroom house is located within a large garden in Waterkloof, a hilltop suburb to the east of Pretoria with views over the city and the Magaliesberg mountains. Although the property is not listed as a heritage resource by City of Tshwane, and is younger than 60 years so is yet to be protected by the National Heritage Council, it has been recognised for its strong architectural significance.

W design architecture studio worked with heritage consultant Nicholas Clarke to illustrate and justify all aspects of the renovation and allay concerns by local architects and the Pretoria Institute for Architecture who regard the property as being a strong representation of Pretoria Architecture.

Read the full story on this renovated Waterkloof home.

Kenilworth Home

You know, I counted every single brick in this house,” says architect Adèle Naudé Santos, smiling, as she stands looking around the main bedroom of the first house she ever designed – a solid Modernist four-bedroomer completed in 1967 and situated in a narrow, leafy avenue in Cape Town’s Kenilworth.

She may not actually be joking. Their modular layout, visible through the unplastered whitewashed walls, means you could conceivably measure the dimensions of the house brick by brick. US-based Adèle may now be a world-renowned architect, but back then she was just starting her career, and this was her first-ever build. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough, the client was her father, the late architect Hugo Naudé.

Read the full story on this Kenilworth home.

Forest Town House

The Colemans are not your average suburbanites – although chatting to the humble Audrey Coleman, now 90, you wouldn’t guess it. She and her late husband, Max, were active human-rights advocates during the apartheid years, both working for the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee, with Audrey also a long-standing and celebrated member of the legendary human- rights organisation, Black Sash.

House Coleman has major cred too. Built in the early 1980s, it’s a masterpiece of clean lines and geometric shapes and, though tailor-made to be its owners’ retirement home, it’s also a piece of South African design history. “Our son Colin was a student at Wits University and insisted that Pancho Guedes was the only person for the job,” says Audrey of their choice of architect.

Read the full story on this Forest Town house.

Pinelands Home

There’s a certain witchiness to Robert Silke‘s new family home in the Cape Town suburb of Pinelands. A darkly dramatic front gate framed by a brick archway reading Caverswall opens onto a narrow garden path, which leads you to a house that’s equal parts imposing and intriguing, with a steeply pitched, clay-tiled roof, spiral chimneys and brickwork finish – all in the same burnt-honey shade. “It’s basically a gingerbread house, right?” says Robert, taking in the facade of the 1938 Arts and Crafts Revival structure he shares with partner Gideon and their one-year-old daughter Lilith.

“Pinelands was established in the 1920s, when there was a big push around the world for an approximation of English country living,” says Robert. “There was a planner in the UK called Ebenezer Howard, who invented the suburb, which he originally called a garden city. The idea gained global traction in reaction to the Spanish flu – people felt that the way they lived in cities wasn’t healthy. Pinelands was actually the third garden city in the world.”

Read the full story on this Pinelands home.

Johannesburg House

What Toni Twidale wanted even more than a house was to live among the trees. “I wanted to see green all the time,” says Toni, who owns this home with her partner Graeme. “I wanted the outside in.” And so they decided to build a house that would, more than anything, be about the site.

The couple enlisted the help of architect Gregory Katz, known locally for his creative, experimental and often unconventional approach. Toni wanted to keep all the indigenous trees; Gregory’s brief, therefore, became something of a mathematical puzzle around fitting the dimensions of a house between the trees. In the end, he settled on two long, slim “bars”, with alternating strips of open space on either side and between them for the driveway, central courtyard and swimming pool. The two wings are connected by what Gregory calls an “umbilical cord” – a glazed corridor that steps down slightly with the slope of the site. The branches of the trees reach up and over a flat concrete roof, which is planted with wavy grass, essentially lifting what would have been on the ground up a level, and adding to the greenery.

Read the full story on this Johannesburg house.

Modernist Durban Home

On first encounter, House Shaw is brutally simple: a series of three-dimensional boxes, positioned beside and on top of one another on a long, triangular site cut into one of the steep slopes that characterise Durban’s forested university suburb. It is made of face brick, concrete, louvre windows, shutters and a bit of aluminium; no need for paint, wallpaper, air conditioning – not even curtains.

The house belongs to Colleen Wygers, who lived here with her late husband, fellow architect Paul Wygers. Sadly, Paul passed away shortly after we photographed the house; with Colleen’s permission, we’ve included his observations from that interview.

Paul liked to describe the home as Modernism morphing the heritage Durban veranda home – and, when it went onto the market in 2013, the couple bought it within hours of their first viewing. Designed by Hallen and Dibb Architects in the 1960s, it had been commissioned by legal luminary Douglas Shaw. “Douglas Shaw was sitting in an Eames chair in the lounge,” recalled Paul. “We chatted briefly about art and architecture. I don’t think he wanted to leave.”

Read the full story on this Modernist Durban home.

Don’t forget to sign up to our weekly newsletter for the latest architecture and design news.

The post 12 Retro Gems That Celebrate the Best of Mid-Century Cool appeared first on Visi.

Here’s a sneak peek at Arbour Nature Estate a new development in George penned by Robert Silke & Partners. If you’re familiar with Robert’s retro-modern work, you’ll know it’s something special…

If you’re a fan of VISI, you’ll know we’re a fan of the buildings designed by Robert Sike & Partners. The apartments, hotels and homes he has conceived illustrate a signature style that looks back to anything from Deco, to Bauhaus, Tropical Modernism and PoMo, translating those aesthetics into a contemporary style that sees his thoroughly modern creations sit very comfortable in among Cape Town’s heritage architecture.

He’s got a couple of new projects on the go – and you’ve had a glimpse of the PoMo inspired Spindle – and here’s the latest… Arbour Nature Estate in George. To be completed by 2026 it’s a development that Robert describes as “Jungle Modernism”. On its riverside site, Arbour Nature Estate will offer everything from homes and apartments, to community amenities like a resort-style lifestyle centre with a double-storey clubhouse, heated outdoor swimming pool, padel court and an open-air cinema.

This is not the first housing estate you have designed, right? 

Long ago we designed Silwerkloof, a neo-Cape Dutch PoMo estate (72 houses) in Plattekloof in the 2000’s, so it’s been nearly twenty years.

So what was the brief for Arbour Nature Estate?

David Cohen (the MD of Signatura) had been talking to us for some years about his dream of developing a completely-immersive modernist environment; a “new town” where we could design all the aesthetic details, and where every way you look would be sculptural “white plastic” modernism. So when Signatura came accross 11ha of prime riverfront land in the centre of George, David called me (it might have been New Year’s Day 2022) to say it’s time for us to build that “new town” we’d been talking about.

And what inspired the design … and how would you describe its aesthetic?

The environment is the starting point of course. Half of the site is a sensitive riverine forest, and the other half is lawn. So the first decision was not to touch the forest or the river, which means that the estate has its own private nature reserve. The Garden Route’s coastal temperate climate is “sub-sub-tropical”, which means that George can have trees and plants that we can only dream of in Cape Town … and thus we conceived of Jungle Modernism, where curvaceous smooth white walls juxtapose against Strelitzias, palms, Cape Chestnut trees and the occasional Loerie.

Who is this estate aimed at and how does the design meet the needs of the community it’s aimed at?

Signatura’s starting point was to develop a new Garden Route suburb with a broad range of accommodation – something for everyone. Having said that, people don’t come to George to live in a micro-flat, but rather they come here for a better lifestyle. Thus the smallest living units range from 60m² 2-bedroom apartments ; to 140m² 3-bedroom duplexes; to 170m² 3-bedroom simplexes ; to 220m² 4-bedroom villas. But the estate also needs a heart and soul and a communal focus. To this end there’s a multi-storey clubhouse and sports centre, with entertainment deck, padel tennis court, large pool, fire pits and braai terraces – with a massive sculptural projection wall for night-time drive-in-style movies and major televised sports events. There’s even separate dog parks for small and large dogs. A Garden Route utopia celebrating the best of the South African way of life.

In designing a housing estate, what are the specific architectural challenges you need to solves during the design and construction of the housing estate… and how did you overcome them while preserving the architectural style?

Architects (whose buildings are often object-orientated) sometimes struggle with urban design, because good urban design is rather about developing a keen interest in the spaces between those buildings. The key to a successful and beautiful urban environment is to design the homes in such a way as to create desirable, sheltered and defensible spaces between the houses. We designed a system of closes and cul-de-sacs, whereby smaller neighbourhoods of houses are clustered around quiet, landscaped dead-end lanes – the kind of environment where you might still find kids playing cricket in the street.

What choice of materials and construction techniques will be used in the project, particularly with regard to creating the architectural style you’ve designed?

Our “house style” is very much centred around the traditional Western Cape vernacular of white-plastered masonry walls with parapets around their roofs. Just because we’re building in the Garden Route doesn’t mean we have to chop down forests in order to clad buildings in timber – which is environmentally pretentious and detrimental. Rather we use ubiquitously-available sand and clay and “white-wash” to make our architecture – somewhat like the Cape Dutch – and we take pure joy from extracting the maximum quantum of sculpture from tried-and-tested Cape construction techniques that intersect happily with the principles of pure international modernism.

Are there any sustainable design principles and innovative technologies that will be used to enhance its functionality and reduce its environmental impact?

The apartment buildings have very large north-facing roofs that will be fully-exploited for solar power collection for the use of the development, whilst there will be not one conventional electric geyser in any of the estate’s 179 dwelling units. The entire electrical system is designed to be impervious to load shedding. Half of the site comprises a riverine forest, which remains entirely undisturbed.

Other than that the estate is embarking on a rehabilitation process to replace exotic trees and shrubs with indigenous. 5ha of flat Kikuyu (a proverbial dessert of lawn) is being replaced with 179 comfortable new households and associated landscaping – which is in itself a gift to the environment.

Looking for more architectural inspiration? Sign up to our weekly newsletter, here.

The post George Meets Jungle Modernism appeared first on Visi.

Besides being a way of life, Minimalism is an ethos of design and architecture that places value on the things that matter most, revealing an authenticity in what we really need in our homes.

Any discussion about Minimalism as a design movement would have to start in the East. Traditional Japanese design, with its concepts of ikebana (precise floral arrangement), wabisabi (authenticity in natural imperfection) and ma (spatial intervals), existed long before the rest of the world embraced Minimalism in the 1960s and ’70s.

This Western turn to simple, pared-back, contemplative forms was mostly in opposition to Abstract Expressionism, with its dramatic excess and perceived spontaneity. Minimalists – in art, music, literature, fashion and architecture – were more interested in pauses and reflection. They sought to include resolved form, calming space and considered materials rather than extra brushstrokes, layered harmonies, additional sentences, more accessories or unnecessary walls.

For design, this meant clean, reductive lines, a simple colour palette and a deliberate focus on function that adds value. Minimalism, at its core, became about the stripped down essentials, allowing buildings, products and interiors to reveal their true essence without superfluous distraction.

A rejection of lavish over-decoration, its textbook roots lie in the first half of the 1900s, in the De Stijl movement founded in The Netherlands, which employed only horizontal and vertical lines, and black, white and primary colours, and Bauhaus, in which the phrase “less in more” was coined by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Counter-Composition V by Theo Van Doesburg, the Dutch artist who was the founder and leader of De Stijl.

The Apple brand, Helvetica typeface and Scandinavian design are examples of Minimalism’s continued relevance. Marie Kondo’s ruthless rules to decluttering your lifestyle, and Netflix’s Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, which depicts people rejecting fast fashion and living in the smallest homes possible, have further highlighted this contemporary trend. The word is now even associated with anti-consumerism, and a concern for sustainability and environmental impact.

Celebrated British architectural designer John Pawson’s work is very clearly influenced by Zen principles learned from years spent working in Japan and his voluminous Minimalist spaces provide a sense of clarity, depth and aliveness. “Minimalism is not defined by what is not there, but by the rightness of what is, and the richness with which this is experienced,” is Pawson’s definition. “It’s just about making sure you don’t have more than you need.”

John Pawson’s Hotel Puerta America in Madrid.

Pawson lists late American artist Donald Judd and his 1965 essay, Minimalism in Specific Objects, as a key inspiration. There’s a clear link between the principles applied to Judd’s simple, modular, geometric sculptures of industrial material – metal, concrete, and plastic – and Pawson’s church, museum, residential and retail projects.

“Untitled” by Donald Judd at the Tate Modern in London.

Fittingly though, any discussion on Minimalism should also conclude in the East … and with Japanese architects and Pritzker Prize winners Tadao Ando and Kazuyo Sejima. These globally celebrated Minimalists are lauded for a building style that prioritises the emotional impact of bareness and foremost in their work is the manner in which their Japanese culture views the relationship between buildings and nature.

The 21 21 Design Sight art gallery in Tokyo by Tadao Ando.

Kazuyo Sejima’s Sumida Hokusai Museum, Tokyo.

Besides the remarkable buildings the two architects have designed in Japan, Ando’s Armani World headquarters in Milan and Sejima’s design for New York’s New Museum have become part of the Minimalist landscape in the West.

From Bauhaus to Brutalism, find out about more design movements, here.

The post Design Deconstruction: Minimalism appeared first on Visi.

WORDS Jessica Ross PHOTOS Jan Ras PRODUCTION Mark Serra

There’s something altogether contrary about designing a Fresnaye house that presides over the Atlantic Seaboard without giving a second thought to the views. But when it comes to this dazzling home, there’s no desire to follow the rules. You’ll find soft curves where you’d expect sharp right angles and, while you’re cleverly protected from onlookers, glass-walled neighbours find themselves exposed.

“They didn’t care a damn for the views,” says architect Robert Silke of Robert Silke & Partners about the homeowners’ brief. “It had to be a functioning family home – that it has views is a bonus.” But take one glance at the bleached-white, three-storey structure that looks a little like an abstract jigsaw puzzle from the outside and you know there’s more to this house than just a family home. Robert insists that “it’s a pragmatic family home, not a showpiece house”, then a moment later gleefully proclaims, “It’s a bit like a spaceship arrived in Fresnaye.” Then again, this architect has quite the contrary reputation, shunning the dominant vernacular for edgy takes on Art Deco and early minimalism that feel at once retro and fresh.

You may remember his striking apartment block – Tuynhuys – that adorned the cover of VISI 106. Students of architecture will recognise the structure’s modernist underpinnings, rooted in the homeowners’ deep connection to Tel Aviv Bauhaus. “We were heavily influenced by White City design”, says the owner, referring to the large group of buildings created in 1930s Tel Aviv. “It’s really beautiful in its simplicity.”

Creating something both beautiful and simple, however, is no easy accomplishment. “There’s virtually not a brick in this building,” Robert says. “The entire thing is cast out of concrete. It’s more of a carving.” As a result, there are no V-joints or weep holes in its plaster. “It has no umbilical cord, no belly button. There’s something otherworldly about it in that there’s no evidence of its making.”

The idea of the house as a piece of sculpture is also apt when inside it looks like a gallery, showcasing the owners’ collection of art by the likes of Michael Taylor, William Kentridge and Hugh Byrne. But despite the museum-like proportions, it still manages to exude warmth. “You feel sheltered, safe and cosy inside – as if you’re being hugged by the walls,” says the owner. Much of that is down to the lighting, which Alex Geh, fellow architect at Robert Silke & Partners and co-designer on this project, took pleasure in tucking out of sight. “Alex was hiding lights all over,” Robert says with a laugh. “There’s this mysterious ethereal glow that comes out of these nooks, crannies and crevices.”

The house is also engineered to maximise natural light as it moves during the day, he adds. “It’s exceptionally warm and intimate. There’s always a beam of light on the floor.” Alex says he also included “green windows” to frame living terrariums of the forest of established trees outside – a pivotal feature for the homeowners. “The owners chose the site for the trees, so the house steps back to accommodate them and leave them as they are,” he notes.

Warmth is also a result of a carefully considered decor scheme, conceptualised by Andrea Graff, who sought to complement its large spaces through a restrained use of texture and pattern, with a few bold pops of colour. “The architecture of the home is so spectacular, simple and honest, I didn’t want to compete with that – it was about practicality,” says Andrea.

One of the key details of the interior is the pre-distressed chevron floor, which unifies its spaces and is particularly well trodden by the kids who race barefoot across its length, chase up staircases, and fill its corners with puzzles and homework. Ultimately, this is a family home and it’s designed to bring members of the clan together, whether they’re all strewn around the pyjama lounge playing games, out on their shared balcony, or coming together for Shabbat at the custom-made dining table. Yes, it might look like a spaceship to an outsider, but inside, it’s all very down to earth.

Looking for more architectural inspiration? Take a look at this bold contemporary Johannesburg home.

The post Fresnaye Family Home appeared first on Visi.

It may have only existed as an educational institute for 14 years, but the Bauhaus school remains a powerful influence on contemporary design – and here’s why.

A century ago, architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany with a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts in a single creative expression. Glass-fronted concrete buildings, built-in kitchens, tubular steel furniture and stark white walls all link back to this school of thought that stripped everything to its bare-bones function before fashioning form. Gropius insisted on designing by “starting from zero”.

So, in walked sans serif fonts lacking capital letters (serifs and uppercase wasted time and printing money) and right-angled flat-roof dwellings (pitched roofs and voluminous hallways were superfluous). Originally established to unite the art of the elite with the craft of artisans during a post-WWI era in which society needed a reality check, the Bauhaus philosophy was to make design accessible to all, utilising modern materials and industrial techniques. Here, apprentices and journeymen (they were never called students) learnt in workshops (not lecture halls), challenging design assumptions through experimentation and play.

By teaching metalwork, stained glass, mural painting, joinery, typography, pottery, weaving, book-binding and even theatre, the school was a hub of creative energy fuelled by an enquiry into technical skill, presented by Masters (don’t call them professors!) such as Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Herbert Bayer.

It’s from this school that the dynamic textiles of Gunta Stölzl emerged, along with the spherical ashtrays of Marianne Brandt, complete with nifty cigarette holder, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s bulbous table lamp. When it relocated to Dessau in 1925, with Director Hannes Meyer, it began to pay attention to architecture too.

Under the later directorship of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school became predominantly focused on this discipline but, after relocating again to Berlin, it shut its doors in 1933 as a result of Nazi political pressure.

The school’s spirit, however, endured, as Gropius and Breuer moved to the US to teach at Harvard, while other Masters relocated to the Soviet Union, Israel and other parts of Europe and the US, spreading the pioneering design movement of “less is more” and introducing Bauhaus’s avant-garde system of instruction to international curricula.

Even today, in South Africa, the impact is evident – not least because one of the school’s last students, Pius Pahl, relocated to Stellenbosch. His buildings can be viewed around the country, their geometric forms overtly Bauhaus.

A contemporary generation of local designers has been equally influenced, as noted in pieces like Joe Paine’s tubular Santa Barbara Shelf (he says that a school project on Bauhaus is what provoked him to study design); the stripped-back modular Format System of Dokter and Misses, who describe their very first designs as “Bauhaus-meets-Dr Alban”; and The Ninevites’ colourful symmetrical rugs that could sit comfortably alongside the patterned, colour-coded artworks of Bauhaus power couple Josef and Anni Albers. The 100-year-old Bauhaus is, it would seem, still fulfilling its legacy.

Looking for more on design? Read all about the Art Deco design movement.

The post Design Deconstruction: Bauhaus appeared first on Visi.

We are once again blown away by the astuteness of trend forecaster Li Edelkoort’s latest observation – a revival of the Memphis design movement of the 1980s and how South Africa is leading the charge. Based on this, she is curating an exhibition that will premiere at this year’s Design Indaba. Here, Li writes about how she traced the trend.

Over the past few months, small signs have emerged that show a renewed interest in the Memphis design movement. It seems this revival with a taste for bolder colours is already influencing the most avant-garde designers. The Italian master Ettore Sottsass would have agreed: “Memphis,” he said, “is everywhere and for everyone.” Yet he is also known for saying that Memphis was “like a hard drug” and therefore one couldn’t take too much of it.

The hunch I have about the revival of a Memphis style is fired by the colours used by Scholten & Baijings and the humorous masks by Bertjan Pot, as well as a chance encounter I had at London Design Week with a brand called Rebay – they simply layer coloured glass plates and bowls in a wonderful homage to the Memphis movement.

Sottsass founded Memphis in December 1981 and named it after a song by Bob Dylan. The desire was to break with modernism’s industrial functionalism and the Italian way of glamorous and pompous design. The group included Alessandro Mendini, Andrea Branzi, Michele de Lucchi, Matteo Thun, Shiro Kurumata, Michael Graves, Javier Mariscal and many other designers from different countries. They wanted to create decorative arts and therefore combined Art Deco inspirations with pop art, street art and kitchen kitsch from the 1950s. They set themselves free with colourful and patterned laminates, historical forms, wild animal materials, printed glass, loud celluloid, neon tubes and metal plates finished with spangles and glitter. They revindicated the fact that design was not for eternity and could be just for fun, adhering to the principles of pop art. The colourful furniture was sensational and considered bizarre, once even described as a blend of Bauhaus and Fisher-Price.

The movement coincided with the reign of disco-dancing when pop icons like Grace Jones dressed and moved like Memphis in loud colour-blocked outfits (which have already made a fashion comeback). Jones was photographed by her then-lover, the graphic artist Jean-Paul Goude, in graphic style, cutting up her length and limbs to become a totem of desire. 

During the 1980s, South Africa was still struggling with apartheid and it was only in 1994 that the country became the democratic nation we now know and love. Straight after the end of apartheid, young designers and decorators of the country set out to create a South African style mixing contemporary, folkloric and iconic African elements such as spears, zebra stripes, wooden masks and African stools. Bars, restaurants and early boutique hotels invented this first funky South African design language. But that movement was quickly saturated and the design community turned to arts, crafts and textiles instead. These trends developed in a great outpouring of rustic and organic style, including architecture, design and food, which celebrated the well-being of South African life.

Now these long-lasting trends can gain inspiration from new ideas working with colour, craft and pattern, liberating themselves in much the same way that Memphis did. Working on my forecasts for 2014 and beyond, it became clear to me that there is a kinship between the Memphis ideas and South African style, between shantytown colours and Italian kitchen laminates from that period. The use of tactile matter, coloured patterns, animal skins, fringes and finishes, light bulbs and neons, are all reason to believe we can expect an Eighties-inspired revival of some magnitude.

What makes this movement so African in feeling?

I believe the stacking and layering of colour and materials delivers a totemic quality to the designs. One of the most iconic design objects ever is the Carlton Cabinet by Sottsass. It looks and acts like a totem with a strange African vibe, stretching out its arms to the world. Mendini’s vases are also totemic constructions with an African echo. I feel textiles will keep on talking, with wilder patterns, stronger colours and nobler fibres. Rugs, in particular, will make a comeback, acting as oversized art pieces for our floors. Nomadic influences will turn to transportable items such as tray tables, folding furniture, blankets and cushions. The idea of stacking, storing, building and constructing new African totems is emerging; the world is looking to Africa to be inspired – like slaves to the rhythm! (also the title of Grace Jones’ seventh album in 1985)

See the exhibition at the Design Indaba Expo from 1 to 3 March, designindaba.com

Follow Li’s trend forecasts at trendtablet.com

 

The post Totem time appeared first on Visi.