TIME EUROPE
June 26, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 25
One Designer to Watch
Marc Newson wants to curve the world
By BELINDA LUSCOMBE
As design pervades our lives, will people toss industrial designers' names around with the same familiarity as they toss Calvin's, Ralph's or Donna's? Are we even heading into a world where Puffy Combs, having mastered music, clothes and side arms, would want to start his own housewares line? It's not implausible. A fast-moving, jack-of-all-trades breed of designer is emerging, chipping its way into the public consciousness by knocking out the walls between architectural, industrial, product and graphic design, turning out anything from a car to a dish drainer. And it needs no remedial lessons in self-promotion.
Philippe Starck is the most successful avatar of both the "from a spoon to a city" design phenomenon and the fame game. Consumers seek out products — or hotels or, in the case of the New York City restaurant 44, bathrooms — because they are designed by Starck. But younger renaissance types are beginning to follow. Foremost among them — and the designated designer to watch — is a 36-year-old London-based Australian named Marc Newson.
In the past two years, Newson has designed a concept car for Ford, house numbers, a bicycle, the interior of a business jet, chairs, drinking glasses and a restaurant in New York City, to name a few. He believes he could design anything. "People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train," says Newson, who studied silversmithing at art school "because it was the one department which taught you how to build stuff." What he doesn't know he learns by designing. "Now that I've designed one car, I know enough how a car works to build another," he says.
Newson designed everything on the Ford 021C, from the tire treads to the knobs on the dashboard to the upholstery. "It was like 500 design projects at once," he says. And the tangerine-and-white car, with doors that swing different ways, a drawer for a trunk and an led strip for headlights, was not like any other car at the auto show where it was introduced, or anywhere else. While the person who commissioned it, Ford's head designer J Mays, likes the car, he says he wouldn't have made it that way. Which, suggests Newson, was the point.
It's not just car companies calling on unlikely talent to catch the eye of consumer-overcultured buyers. Alessi had Newson design such banal things as a drain stopper, a toilet-roll holder and a bottle opener. Magis had him whip up a coat hanger and a tendriled dish drainer. "I'd love to be approached to do ordinary things more," says Newson. He has designed a range of hair appliances for Vidal Sassoon which will be released later this year.
A $60 dish drainer seems a long way from Newson's first design — a chaise longue made of hammered and riveted aluminum on fiber glass, which can now fetch more than $50,000. But the chaise longue's shape — an overweight hourglass — became the most basic utterance in Newson's vocabulary. He has thinned and thickened it over the years for chairs, soap dishes, doorstops, pepper grinders and bath pillows, but it's nearly always there.
One could argue, in fact, that Newson's designs are about little more than shape. He doesn't rethink what a stopper should do so much as apply his double-blob shape — he calls it the orgone — to the stopper or the project at hand. While this has worked remarkably well for objects, Newson's essays into architecture, as in the case of Canteen, a Manhattan restaurant, have fallen somewhat flat.
Newson's design shortcomings, however, probably won't block his inheritance of the popular mantle of Starck, given his mediagenic ways and eye for contemporary style. Exhibit A: the glossy coffee-table book of his works published first in the U.K. that has an image of the designer himself, not one of his works, on the cover. Puffy, put Alessi on your speed dial.
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June 26, 2000
COVER
The Redesigning of America
High style isn't highbrow. In fact, it's everywhere, for everyone, in everything from can openers to CD racks to cars
One Designer to Watch
Marc Newson wants to curve the world
EUROPE
The Big Chill
The arrest of one of Russia's most outspoken media moguls casts doubt on Putin's promised "rule of law"
Wit That Hits Home
Puppet on a short string
Identity Crisis
Greek church and state clash as new ID cards drop religious affiliation
Tell — But Don't Show
A new law will change the look of French journalism
AFRICA
"Whatever I Do, It Will Never Be Good Enough"
An interview with King Mohammed VI of Morocco
The Warm Embrace
Europe is showing signs that it's keen to better its often uneasy relations with the Maghreb nations
MIDDLE EAST
Chance for the Son To Shine
Syria's Bashar Assad can better his father's miserable legacy
BUSINESS
The Missing Link
A $4 billion engineering feat fulfils a century-old dream of joining Sweden and Denmark — and business is set to boom
Workers of the World, Speak Up
At last, people on the factory floor have entered the globalism debate
TRENDS
Wheelie Good Fun
Shiny, compact and cool, scooters have become Europe's ubiquitous accessory
THE ARTS
The Talented Mr. Ridley
Gladiator director Ridley Scott, enjoying a long-awaited thumbs-up from the crowds, talks about life, death — and why filmmaking is a blood sport
Déjà View
Some leading contemporary artists offer a fresh take on the old masters
Too Many Variations
A fine performance by Donald Sutherland can't save a flawed work
Irreconcilable Differences
Twins recount their lives on opposite sides of war
DEPARTMENTS
World Watch
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