Design in Miami

Running at the same time as Art Basel Miami will be Design Miami.  The two shows, running side by side promoting contemporary art and design hope to capture both art lovers as well as promote and lift 20th century and contemporary design.  The Financial Times has a good preview of Design Miami, running December 1-4.

It is always nice to get the decorative arts and design involved in the art discussion and trends, while being noticed beyond the occasional article or auction results, as many appraisers value and consult on property other than fine art.

The FT reports

For a long time design has been trying to squeeze into the territory occupied by an ever-inflationary art market and the oddness of the fit often shows. In Miami the attempts to establish a separate design district beyond the art fair itself created an awkward spread, and now that the two disciplines are back together again, with Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami side by side, design curators seem to be trying harder to give their area of interest the heft to be noticed beside the glamour and the cachet of wealth that adheres to art.

At the June edition of Design Miami, in Basel, Galerie Patrick Seguin’s daily assembly and disassembly of a Jean Prouvé house proved an irresistibly theatrical event, and Miami is working hard to match it.

The focus this year is on Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), the eccentric visionary engineer whose ambitious, oddly ageless ideas still exert a powerful influence on architecture and design. His “Fly’s Eye” dome is a curious sci-fi truncated globe with retro, pop art piercings, conceived as a low-cost shelter framework capable of being delivered by aeroplane. Here, on the lawn outside the fair, the dome (from the Craig Robins’ Collection) looks like a crashed alien pod. Also here will be “Bucky” Fuller’s Dymaxion 4 car, a 1937-patented 3-wheeler which would have been able to hover and fly, if only the technology had been around.

British architect David Adjaye has been named as Design Miami Designer of the Year (an unusual accolade for an architect) and his challenge is to create a structure to compete and compel. He’s an experienced creator of pavilions, his collaboration with Olafur Eliasson (“Your Black Horizon”) exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2005, was one of the most memorable of recent years; “Horizon”, shown at the Albion Gallery in London in 2008, was also compelling. For Miami he’s building a structure with a triangular plan, hollowed out to create a space pierced with ovoid holes which recall Fuller’s dome.

To read the full article, click HERE.