Page 3
The FAD centenary Year of Design
by Juli Capella President of the FAD

The year 1903 is famous because it was the first year an aeroplane flew, and because Ford started manufacturing the first mass-produced car. In Spain, the firm Hispano-Suiza also presented their first car, and the Industrial Revolution that had taken so long to get here began to pervade all areas of society. Meanwhile, somebody saw this as an opportunity to improve their material environment. A small group of 43 architects, craftsmen and artists founded Fomento de las Artes Decorativas - Promotion of the Decorative Arts - in a street in the Barcelona district of El Raval. They sought to avoid the coldness of industry and promote a finer formal quality in the things which we live amongst and use. The idea wasn't new; William Morris and his Arts & Crafts movement had already put it forward years earlier, and their message caught on with organisations such as Deutscher Werkbund (1907) and Wiener Werksutäte, created with the aim of harmonising industry with good taste. But after their time of splendour, most of these glorious institutions disappeared as modern design established itself.
The FAD is a worldwide exception; no other similar body has lasted for a century, promoting architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, crafts, jewellery, fashion, and now also audiovisuals. The key has been its constant renewal, its adaptation to the spirit of the times, the opening up of new disciplines, its continual growth into new geographical areas. And especially its independence. The FAD supports itself thanks to the financial and theoretical contributions and the energy of its 1,500 members (200 of which are companies), which are spent on promoting better-quality design in society.
It was for this reason that when the FAD saw its centenary looming, instead of organising an endogamous, closed, self-congratulating event, it preferred to offer the celebration to the citizens, who after all are the end users of everything that's designed. Rather than boasting about how much has been done, we decided to go out into the street and see whether our disciplines are actually doing people any good. To do this, we've asked for help from different levels of government: the City Council, the Catalan Government and the Ministry, who have enthusiastically entrusted us with a whole year of debate, reflection and activism on the subject of design. To this end we have a team led by Joan Vinyets, a renowned teacher and promoter of design, who has prepared a full and qualified programme.
We're going to look forwards again, feeding, to be sure, on a rich past; we're going to conduct self-criticism on these years of upheaval in design; we're going to try and explain ourselves better, gather together the concerns of all citizens and users, create links between designers and entrepreneurs, encourage the participation of all those involved, give opportunities to those who are starting out. We want to put an end, once and for all, to the stereotyped, frivolous image of design as something added on, capricious, expensive... when it should be quite the opposite. In short, we're going to project Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain as leaders of design, inventiveness and creativity on an international scale. We're going to show that design is synonymous with progress.




Page 4
Design as a factor of quality
By Joan Clos Mayor of Barcelona

On 14 March 1903, in a flat in Carrer Hospital, Foment de les Arts Decoratives (FAD) was born, in typical Barcelona style: getting industrialists and artisans together round the same table with the aim of promoting a sector in which they sensed - remember that this was in the midst of the Modernista boom - that Catalonia had a lot to say. The interesting thing is that this "foment", this "promotion", involved not only artists and artisans but also industrialists, those who when all was said and done would place the product on the market. A hundred years later, we've grown up; we've traded in "decorative arts" for "design", because we've broadened the concept. And now, on this other 14 March, the FAD - the same association but fully updated - proposes the Year of Design, based on a profound civic and institutional accord, so that once again we can have our say in a field that we perceive to be our own.
If it didn't amount to sacrilege, the FAD ought to change its name (Avant-Garde of Design?). It's grown to the point where it takes in a long list of disciplines related to creativity: architecture, graphic communication, fashion, photography, industrial design, crafts, plastic arts... anything the imagination can conceive and the hand can draw. And from this multiple platform, which also "promotes" exchange and cross-breeding, the FAD says to us: let's think about design, that is, let's think about everything around us, our objects and our landscape, let's ask ourselves questions, and have fun doing it. And let's do it most of all in Barcelona - although in other cities too - because in Barcelona, design is a vice and a vocation, and almost a necessity.
When we talk about design we immediately turn to glamorous creations, forgetting that everything is designed by somebody somewhere, and also that many of the great designs that furnish our everyday lives are anonymous; we don't know who designed the clothespeg, the corkscrew or the paperclip. This brings something else home to us: it's the idea that prevails. There's no design without an idea. And the idea is born of the perception of the problem and the awareness of the whole, the surroundings. I'm pleased that this reflection is taking place in Barcelona, a city that's opted for quality space, with all that this entails in terms of proportion, materials, textures, furniture, capacity for use... And what's more, a city that's building its own Design Museum with innovative criteria.
The programme of the Year of Design is packed with imagination: exciting proposals, routes to rediscover the obvious and to discover the unsuspected, debates, lectures, exhibitions. The outcome of all this should be the awareness that design is a factor of quality, in other words, a factor of wealth, of added value. That this global design is an essential part of the Knowledge City. And that although everywhere there's a lot of frustrated design (we're shown this too in this catalogue of activities), we can guarantee quality, imagination and efficiency

Page 6
What is design?
By Òscar Guayabero
Paradesigner. Curator of the Year of Design

· Òscar Guayabero (OG): I'll put that well-known question on the table as a centrepiece: What is design?
André Ricard (AR): The question's complex, but it's true that it's still essential.
Martín Ruiz de Azúa (MR): It's one of those questions that slips through your fingers when you try to grasp the answer.
· OG: Well, if the word "design" is complex, perhaps we could start with the qualifying adjectives: industrial, product, object.
AR: We who design objects have taken over the term "industrial", when in fact a printed book is every bit as industrial as a lamp. And "product" is ambiguous too, because a book is still a product.
OG: That's true; recently a graphic designer was telling us how if you put together all the economic activity surrounding graphic design - paper, printing, publishing, websites, etc. - it beats the gross domestic product of what we call industrial design by a long chalk.
AR: Over the years we've come to realise that the mentality of the graphic designer and that of the industrial designer are essentially the same; all that differs is the medium.
MR: I studied Fine Art, and there Design is studied without disciplines, with a lot of theory. So for us design was a criterion which you later applied wherever necessary.
AR: In the Art Center of Switzerland, where I taught, the students also had common years, and it was only towards the end that they decided what they wanted to do.
MR: I never chose it; I think I ended up with objects mainly through friends, and sheer luck.
· OG: Maybe design is more the process than the result?
AR: We're only just beginning, but just to try to get a definition off the ground, I'd say that design is basically two things:
1. The channel that human beings have travelled along since they first existed, in order to overcome the great disadvantage they are at regarding nature. Clearly, our physical conditions wouldn't have allowed us to survive without "prostheses", objects that help us to cut things, make fire and take shelter.
2. It's a way of understanding life. We designers apply design in everything we do, because it's a rational and at the same time imaginative way to find solutions to the problems we come up against. It can be a need for objects, an environment, a way of dressing.
MR: That's a very open definition, and such I think it's a good one. Design is a sort of harmony that surrounds you. You identify it in those people who project part of their personality in their surroundings; it's selective.
· OG: From this point of view the user, the consumer, also designs. When they choose the furniture for their home they're designing it.
AR: Being a designer is knowing how to choose, not just creating.
MR: It's also true that sometimes people put too much importance on design, and that makes for comical or exaggerated situations.
AR: The thing is, the word is often used rather badly. There's an anecdote I can tell you about this: a collaborator of mine went to the hairdresser's, and when he came back he told us he was about to hang up his coat and the hairdresser said, "No, not there; that's a designer coat-rack."
MR: That's when design is understood as elaborate, unnecessary, frivolous objects.
· OG: To what extent are the eighties and its apparent design boom responsible for this?
AR: It's obvious. It'll take us a lot of effort to undo this frivolous image the public has of us.
OG: And the media and the politicians have their share of responsibility, too. That's how Barcelona design was "blown up" at that time. Since then some very negative readings have been made of the concept of "design". You may remember, in the last Catalan elections, one candidate accusing another of being a "designer candidate". Then I and a few other designers wrote a letter saying that, without meaning to, he'd said that the other candidate was rational, good at solving problems, measured, he met our needs, etc.
MR: Yes, it's an interesting use of the qualifier "designer"; it means when excessive importance is been given to purely formal aspects. Right now, some of us are trying to work out how to rethink our environment, but on the basis of content, not forms. Some of our objects are even ugly, or deny formal interest.
AR: If there was one movement that harmed design, it must be Memphis (1). It undoubtedly had a good side. It brought a breath of fresh air into the rigid panorama of rationalism. But the other side of the coin is that it put across the idea that design was a series of tics. It meant you had to make chairs with crooked legs and use fake leather and different-coloured Formica. In other words, it was all about dressing up normal objects according to a fashion, instead of studying the problem. And that still happens.
MR: But Memphis didn't come straight out of the blue. There had been other times when excess was a value, like the aerodynamic age in the fifties in America. I'm fairly respectful of these things. I put them in the context of the discourse between designers, and I think they generate a certain healthy amount of controversy. Things are rethought every so often. Something happens that produces a conflict, and that generates a dialectics.
AR: The thing that worried me about Memphis was that it was more of a commercial operation than a cultural movement.
MR: The only thing a lot of people got to see of Memphis were its colours. The furniture was too expensive and we only saw it in the galleries, but the colours filled up our surroundings.
· OG: Don't you think it was the reading that was given to the movement? I mean, we were fed up with objects that took rationalism and functionalism as tics too. Unornamented things with pure lines, chrome and polished seams look as if they're rational whereas often they're just anecdotal gadgets.
AR: Right. That's the point at which instead of "design" we ought to be using a different word: "stylism".
MR: Often the designer's asked to come up with what the French call "a recognisable hand"; common tics that serve to reflect the author. Once again, we're back with the sanctification of form.
· OG: Changing the terms a little, what role do you think the designer should have in the industry-design-trader-user relationship?
MR: Now the designer's position seems to be very much subordinated to the interests of the industry, whereas in the past there was more of a feeling of responsibility towards the user. Even to the point of naivety; they thought design could, if not set the world to rights, at least improve it. Now the industry has gained ground, and the designer seems to have been left with no more than the "clothes" or the appearance of objects, not the basic approach to them. The designer's also there to ask questions, not just to give answers.
AR: I think we have to sit back and take stock of everything, not only to delete the past but often to recover it. Maybe that's what's missing. For example, it's a mistake to make a three-legged chair, and the past confirms the fact. It's a bit like reinventing the wheel because it's too familiar.
Whatever the case, it's undeniable that the industry has imposed many approaches. The industry's come between the designer and the user. If we look back to the days of craftsmanship, we see that the craftsman knew the needs of his customers firsthand and therefore could provide them with the right answer.
MR: The control exerted by the industry dominates not only the designer but above all the market. Users can't know they need something unless they're familiar with it. And that's what marketing prevents, the appearance on the scene of new proposals that aren't demonstrably profitable, I mean, that don't already exist.
· OG: Maybe that's one of the reasons for the present divorce between designers and industry, in addition, of course, to the fact that these companies, producers, etc., carry on backing only acknowledged designers in order to ensure sales.
AR: That's absolutely true, and worrying. They don't realise that the future of design depends precisely on the incorporation of young designers with young ideas into the market. Often the manufacturer's reasoning is, "They haven't got a name, so I'm not interested."
OG: But the generation we're talking about, the eighties generation, they weren't well-known either when they started out. What was the mechanism that made companies go for them then and isn't working now?
MR: I think different factors converge at different times to encourage renewal. Now designers are expected to be the razzmatazz of design. When you visit the furniture shows in Milan or Valencia, you often see innovative proposals the only purpose of which is to be shown in these exhibition environments, not to reach the market. So you get a sensation of constant renewal which isn't real.
AR: Lots of companies give this image of modernity when they carry on selling the same furniture they always did.
MR: We often like to take Italy as our role model, and we find that there they've set up a system of reciprocal benefit. Companies provide the designer with fame, and the designer plays along by offering "media" objects, i.e., objects that are innovative, showy, excessive, etc. Perhaps we should do that here too.
AR: I agree, but all the same, I'm wary of the show-biz side of design. Perhaps because my objects have always been humble; an ashtray or a milk bottle aren't too spectacular. I don't think we should enter into this system of the media event; it places too much importance on names and too little on quality.
· OG:A few years ago Òscar Tusquets said that when he tried to define Catalan design he came to the conclusion that it was about objects of relative beauty, with a fine finish but rather void of content, "grey" objects. This view contrasts with the image of creativity we have abroad.
MR: Yes, and you have to differentiate between creativity and excess. In fact, restraint is a very Catalan trait, and a virtue. But within this austerity we have to provide answers for new needs.
AR: In this, too, the industry has some of the responsibility. It's never tried to spotlight the quality of objects but their appearance, their fashionableness, trends. Communication has made even well-designed objects frivolous. One example: many years ago I designed a bottle for shower gel. I designed the top so it'd be easy to hold, in a bright colour in case you dropped it, with a shape that let you to stand it upside down so you could use the gel right to the end, and so on. The adverts were of a lady in a bathtub in the South Seas, with a message of erotic exoticism, without any reference to the advantages of the new bottle.
MR: An effort should be made to explain, almost to teach, the values of design, both functionally and culturally.
· OG: Personally, now that for various reasons I've had to review our history with regard to objects, I find that I feel closer to the approaches of the sixties and early seventies than more recent productions. Perhaps because of what we were saying about the awareness of rethinking in their conception and not just in their form.
AR: I'd say that the innovations of those times are the one that'll last longest.
MR: Because at that time designers focused on unsolved problems. Now designers focus on things that are no longer problems - or at least not the user's problems.
AR: Everything that's been solved can be improved; the problem is when we fall into reiteration. Once you've seen endless chair catalogues you say, "No more chairs, please!"
OG: Maybe the user doesn't need more chairs, but the industry does; we're back on the subject of marketing and consuming. Or maybe we do need more chairs, but for uses other than those already covered.
AR: That's right. The folding chair, for example, isn't properly solved. Here's a common situation: in a house you've got six fixed chairs at the most, but every now and then you have twelve guests. Obviously, you need an element that provides an efficient solution for this situation without getting in the way the rest of the time, and this isn't tackled by any of the infinite number of chairs on the market.
MR: You always see reruns of things. The industry feeds off the vision of its commercial division.
OG: Recently the anthropologist Manuel Delgado mentioned the fact that in a neighbourhood association meeting in El Poblenou, concern was voiced that the 22@ project might turn the area into a "designer neighbourhood". He said there's a glut of design, when really there are a host of areas of domestic life that haven't incorporated design (as opposed to designer) solutions that provide an effective response.
· OG: Well then, what stage are we at right now? Do we need to go back to the cliché that design is in crisis?
MR: This is also a very open time for design and designers. We're taking a fresh look at the role of design and where it should be heading. We're looking for new points of reference, in the past and in other cultures that appear to be less developed but have a more satisfactory relationship with their environment than we do. Design is opening itself up to being multidisciplinary and being performed in collaboration.
AR: When people talk about the crisis of design I don't understand. If we accept that design is the ability to overcome man's shortcomings and improve his surroundings there can't be any crisis, because that would mean that everything was solved. What's in crisis is the business model, not the discipline.
MR: Perhaps crisis is a good thing, because new answers arise out of crises. We've got to ask the question: design for whose good?
· OG: But now that a lot of people are filling their homes with furniture from Ikea - and let's not go into its rather suspicious production systems as regards the environment, working conditions and so on - clearly something's changed. How do you think this new situation affects the reading people give to design?
AR: I witnessed the birth of Ikea a few years ago in Switzerland, and the first thing I noticed was that the company, the system, was a magnificent design. It was like everything was already done for you; before there were furniture shops, lighting shops, bathroom shops, but now suddenly you could visualise whole houses. On top of that, it's encouraged a certain amount of user participation.
MR: The feeling of DIY is expressed throughout, from the shop itself to the products.
AR: They make a considerable effort to explain how to assemble the furniture, with few drawings, and what's more, in a way that's understandable to many cultures. It's brought about a crisis in more elitist models of shops.
MR: What I find disturbing is, for example, one of Ikea's first advertising campaigns showed a couple smashing plates in an argument, because they were cheap. This disregard for cheap objects offends me. But it's true that it's got across the idea that contemporary furniture is for normal people, whereas before, the few shops you could find were laid out in a way that made you feel, "OK, I know that's not for me, it's bound to be wildly overpriced."
· OG: Leaving furniture aside for a moment... don't you think that "serious" design, like containers, for example, which André was talking about before, is confined by marketing? I mean, the only requirement is for it to take up more space on the supermarket shelf so that the brand is more visible and it looks like you get more product.
AR: Even then you can still do things. You have to take that as a mandatory point of departure and then work on other aspects like ergonomics, communication, etc.
MR: That's right. A bottle of shower gel should work well and, through those little details, it makes our lives go more smoothly. But they're very isolated problems; you also have to step back a bit and see things in perspective, so that you can adopt an approach to, for example, the whole idea of having a shower, of cleaning our body.
· OG: I think that's what we're after, the vision of the designer who asks questions rather than giving a different appearance to products that are basically the same. The case of cars is blatant: we've all got the same car with different bodywork.
MR: The market offers a false range of options. Really all you can choose is more of the same, and the only thing that varies is the nonsubstantial, that is, the form.
AR: Not long ago, in a congress on automobile engineering, I made just that point. The first thing you have to think about is whether the car is the best solution, and in what cases, and what it should be like in order to offer a better service. Maybe we ought to be thinking along the lines of other more modular systems, like lorries, where you can have the same cabin with different trailers. It's clear that in the present format it's pretty limited.
MR: The worst thing is that in this situation, with the car chaining you to an endless jam that's just a train but worse and more expensive, the sales strategy is exactly the opposite: the eternal myth that the car gives you freedom. In this case designers probably ought to think up systems rather than objects, anything from car-hire firms to shared electric cars.
· OG: Let's go back to the original question. Although it's true that, as we were saying, design is a series of "prostheses" that we need and therefore is prehistoric, it's also true that the discipline as such took shape in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Now that this industrial phase seems to have given way to the Information Age and the growth of the tertiary sector, how does the concept of design fit into all this?
AR: Let's not kid ourselves, for us the Information Age is a keyboard and a screen, and not very well designed, incidentally. The rest remains the same. What has changed, however, is our way of life. We need to understand that the model of housing doesn't meet our expectations, and in this, architects come up against the same problem we have with manufacturers, but in their case with builders.
MR: I've worked in that line, in a small way. I like to begin a project by asking: what if...? Introduce an element of change. They're unrealisable projects, but they ask questions that help us to advance. They're cultural artefacts.
AR: It's interesting to bring in elements of reflection. In spite of everything, the most basic "prostheses" are still not properly solved: glasses, cutlery, tables, etc., etc.
· OG: And in all this panorama, where can we find room for... not the functional aspect of the object, nor its form, but what we call the symbolic function? The narrative and emotional aspects of objects.
MR: This is one of the aspects that some of us find most interesting. Creating a certain link between the object and ourselves is important too, because it makes us see our environment through different eyes.
AR: I agree with all that line of research. The single object preached by Le Corbusier is always susceptible to the lack of empathy it awakens in many people, and so everybody should choose their own objects. Therefore, diversity is important.
MR: Another interesting aspect is that we try to create open objects in which the users participate and personalise them. This isn't possible in all cases, but in some it's very successful.
AR: But first you have to educate the public. Make them understand that they can decide what the objects that surround them should be like. Still, adding a symbolic side should never be to the detriment of its useful function.
MR: I don't think I share the idea of addition. For me an object's narrative is no less useful than its functionality. Perhaps we need to see that the function is multiple. So acting on the symbolic isn't actually epidermal. Objects that can be regarded as having an unbalanced design because they give priority to one aspect more than the others have nevertheless generated a change of direction and a new attitude, and for that alone, they're useful.
· OG: Perhaps it's not so much a case of strictly fulfilling the useful function, which may have already been solved, but taking a fresh look at that function. For example, we've already got enough comfortable chairs on the market, but is there another way of sitting down?
MR: Exactly, I'm interested in, for instance, objects as detonators of behaviour and of encounters. They're experiments, but they work on hypotheses of new behaviour.
AR: That's fine, if they're experiments, but then they shouldn't be on sale.
MR: Or maybe they should, because they modify that behaviour; perhaps they'll have a short life span, but they open up new channels. Still, I agree that cultural factors are determining, and as you said earlier, they have to be taught.
AR: The thing is, if objects are well designed, you can get by with very few things in your day-to-day life, and it's these indispensable objects that interest me most. For instance, the bowl, as a tool for eating with, is multifunctional, and as such it interests me.
MR: True, but the link you create with it is no less everyday than its use. Even when you're not using it, it creates a sort of landscape that accompanies you.
· OG: Changing the subject again, and here we'll have to finish, do you feel that designers are here to contribute industrial solutions, cut production costs, or what?
AR: Designers are here to promote ideas; to propose new industrial channels, but technical solutions don't always have to come through design. The technology that provides the solution to the questions that are asked comes later.
MR: It's interesting that you should think that, because sometimes people have the idea that "functional" designers are a mixture of engineer and inventor, when really their work is to study the user.
AR: That's because our client isn't the manufacturer but the user.

And so we leave a conversation that went on for considerably longer than what you've read above, but which could be summed up in the two statements made by André Ricard, and which Martín Ruiz de Azúa and I immediately subscribed to:
Design is basically two things:
1. The channel that human beings have travelled along in order to overcome the great disadvantage they are at regarding nature.
2. It's a way of understanding life.

Page 14
A part of the Barcelona identity.
by Raquel Pelta Design historian

At the end of the 18th century, in a historic international situation marked by the French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution, Catalonia began to experience a rise in population that was closely related to a process of change in the modes of production towards what we could call capitalism.
Industrial development, promoted from within owing to the rise of a manufacturing bourgeoisie linked to the new cotton industry, was to prove unstoppable despite the shortage of energy resources and the successive wars, first against Revolutionary France and later against Britain.
So it was that, at the fairly early date - especially in comparison with what happened in the rest of Spain - of 1830 or thereabouts, the Industrial Revolution started in Catalonia. However, as Isabel Campi has pointed out: "The Industrial Revolution did not create industry out of nothing, but transformed it where it already existed".
In Campi's opinion, the Industrial Revolution in Catalonia was along the same lines as it was in England, in that both were built on textile manufacturing and steam power. The textile industry and transport were the first sectors to be mechanised; the factory Josep Bonaplata opened in Carrer Tallers in Barcelona in 1833 was for the manufacture of fabrics, and its machinery was powered entirely by steam. The first steamship was built six years later, and 1848 saw the inauguration of the Barcelona-Mataró railway, the first in Spain. In 1855 Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima was started up to produce ships, steam engines, steam locomotives and machinery for spinning, weaving and textile printing.
By that time Catalonia was already Spain's factory, thanks to this decision to develop steam as a source of energy, which allowed the expansion of the manufacturing system and the mechanisation of the sectors of industry.
In this context, Barcelona, the urbanistic and social structure of which was profoundly transformed, was perceived as an industrious, modern, brilliant and fast-progressing city. Whatever happened there was felt to be determining for the development of any event, whether political, social or cultural.
Between 1835 and the 1860s new thoroughfares were opened up: the axis formed by Ferran, Jaume I and Princesa, Avinguda de la Catedral and Via Laietana. Five years later gas arrived, and the City Council made a series of invitations to tender for the illumination of the city. Passeig de Gràcia was urbanised; in 1854 the city walls were demolished; six years later, in 1860, the Plan for the New Town was passed; and in 1868 the Ciutadella barracks were demolished and the site was turned into a park between 1875 and 1885.
However, the great transformation of the city was to come in 1888, with the Universal Exhibition. In order to get Barcelona ready for the event, the site occupied by the site of the former Ciutadella barracks was urbanised, and town planning improvements were made that encouraged the economic growth of the city. As a result of all this, Barcelona became an open, cosmopolitan city, a centre for the convergence of Europe's cultural trends, though more open to the North than to the South. Through foreign eyes, it appeared as a thoroughly modern city.
By the last quarter of the 19th century, industrial development had made Barcelona a place in which the industrial arts were becoming especially important. This was tangible in the street, as this text published in Fomento de la Producción Española shows: "From the tastefully decorated small shops to the capable and wealthy establishments of our finest streets and squares, all of them have shone with the brilliance of an effective life and progress".
It was precisely the 1888 Exhibition that started off what could be regarded as some of the first reflections to be made in Barcelona in relation, albeit still indirectly, to a discipline that with time was to become an essential part of the identity of the Catalan capital: design.
As Professor Vicente Maestre recounts, in November 1888 the board of the Ateneu Barcelonès began to organise a series of public lectures, held as of January 1889, relating to the Barcelona Universal Exhibition. They served as an analysis of Catalan art and industry at that time.
Although there were a considerable number of critical voices drawing attention to the country's backwardness in comparison with most of Europe, others expressed optimism, especially among the bourgeoisie. This was the case of José María Serrate, who recognised the relative lack of progress but said that: "We now know how to produce, we now have industrial awareness, our products now stand up to comparison with like ones; in short, the consumers now have somewhere to go to satisfy their needs..."
Another of the speakers, Juan Tutau, held that the love of work and the industriousness of the Catalan people combined readily with "artistic taste applied to the arts, so necessary in those years to be able to compete with products from abroad," which shows an awareness of the value of design as a fundamental tool in the production process, a viewpoint that was to coincide with that of a large number of Europe's most advanced artists and architects.
However, there were also those who, like Salvador Sanpere, explored the relationship between art and industry, and made it clear that although the Catalan industrial arts were not in a state of complete prostration, neither were they at the level of countries such as France, Belgium, Germany, or even Hungary or Russia. In his opinion there was a lack of artistic education, and the teaching of draughtsmanship - which he regarded as indispensable for the training of industrial arts professionals - showed many shortcomings.
Sanpere's misgivings coincided with a major movement in favour of redirecting artistic education towards close cooperation with the new industrial production methods. This movement was subscribed by writers such as Miquel i Badia, the above-mentioned Salvador Sanpere and José Ferrer i Soler, bent on spreading renovative ideas on the design processes of both utilitarian and decorative objects which nevertheless were never put into practice for want of artists capable of carrying them out.
This situation was to change with the arrival of the new century and the proposals of Modernisme, the Catalan manifestation of the Art Nouveau movement, one of the aims of which was to dignify the object in the industrial age.
Modernisme, introduced by architects and artisans and extended to the sectors that surround building, the decorative arts, furniture and the graphic arts, had close links with the development of a progressive industrial bourgeoisie in search of a style to represent their power. It was an urban phenomenon and therefore it was Barcelona that provided its main setting.
Through outstanding architects such as Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Puig i Cadafalch and Gaudí, Modernisme sought the total work of art, hence its work included everything from pieces of furniture to the tiniest details in wrought iron.
Modernisme was a time of splendour in architecture, the industrial arts, and especially crafts, the graphic arts and, within them, books. This art movement spelt the end of the idea of art as being limited exclusively to academic circles.
An event of special importance for the history of Catalan design took place in Barcelona on 15 March 1903: the FAD, Fomento de las Artes Decorativas (Promotion of the Decorative Arts) was founded. As time passed, it was to become one of the most actively involved institutions in the promotion and development of the Catalan design scene.
According to the documents that tell of the steps taken before it was founded, the FAD was started up as an "Association for the Protection and Instruction of Decorative Art", and the principles that moved its founders were the same as those of the British Arts & Crafts movement and the Werkbund in Germany. It was an institution made up of artisans, artists, architects and industrialists who sought to make the industrial arts not only an economic tool but also a cultural one.
Thus the FAD took upon itself the task of protecting and promoting the "artistic trades", by organising courses for artisans and artists, exhibitions and competitions, for the purpose of advancing the work of the best professionals and heightening the quality of the products manufactured.
It was the FAD that undertook the organisation of the Spanish representation at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, a milestone in the history of European design.
The result of this participation exceeded all possible expectations, as the Spanish exhibitors - amongst whom the Catalans figured highly - were awarded 50% more prizes than the French themselves.
This success was indicative of a period that was particularly propitious for Barcelona both economically and culturally.
The First World War had had a direct positive influence on the Catalan economy; it served to open up international markets, as foreign competition was temporarily out of the game. This spelt an increase in entrepreneurs' profits, and even though it also brought about a rise in food prices and increased social conflicts, it gave rise to a transformation of the general conditions of collective consumption, financial and commercial facilities, communications and transports.
It was also a period of new social behaviour, as a result of the gradual reduction of working hours and the extension of leisure time, together with new inventions that made day-to-day living easier.
The arrival of electricity in all homes, the appearance of household appliances and department stores, the evolution of public and private transport, the rise of sports and entertainment, were the external signs of a society that was becoming modernised, that was changing from a rural world to an industrialised and urban one.
Between 1920 and 1940, Catalonia - and particularly the capital, Barcelona - witnessed the development of the mass media, coinciding with the improvement of infrastructures, as part of a process that had been conceived in the Mancomunitat years (1914-1923) and consolidated later on, during the Second Republic, precisely because it formed part of a project of modernisation that backed culture as one facet of the programme of social regeneration triggered by the Noucentista movement.
Although the Primo de Rivera dictatorship that started in 1923 was to halt this project to some extent by suspending the Mancomunitat, it did not succeed in stopping cultural and economic progress nor the legacy of Noucentisme, which with the support of artists and literati, but also that of the political powers and the bourgeoisie, had vindicated collective work, and in the words of Santiago Estrany: "The spirit of collective work can be felt in all the creations of the Noucentistas. Thus, drawings, boxwood engravings, typography, books, the plastic arts in general, put their efforts alongside those of architects, painters, sculptors, glassmakers, gardeners, furniture makers... and they created characteristics of their own which give their works a Catalan appearance."
Although Noucentisme was a thing of the past and the dictatorship was a hindrance, Barcelona was open to new artistic and cultural ideas coming from Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. The Dalmau Gallery, for example, held exhibitions of the most advanced European art, and some of the most outstanding avant-garde artists of the period visited or lived in the city (Picabia and the Delaunays, among others).
In this environment, and with the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs fresh in everyone's mind, it was logical that good proposals were made in the terrain of a discipline that was still not called design.
Four years later, in 1929, Barcelona hosted the International Exhibition, an event that served as a showcase for the ideas and projects of the Modern Movement through a series of leading architects including Mies van der Rohe, who designed the German Pavilion, a key work for understanding the architecture of the 20th century. When it was built it immediately had a notable influence on Barcelona's more innovative architects, artists and "designers", among whom we could mention, for example, an extremely young graphic artist called Ricard Giralt Miracle who confessed on occasions that Mies' building had exerted a profound impact on him and had been a factor in his move towards the avant-garde soon after.
In the early 1930s, Barcelona was the setting for one of the most interesting initiatives in Spain in that period: the constitution of the GATCPAC, which stood for Grup d'Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l'Arquitectura Contemporània (Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture), consisting of Josep Lluís Sert (whose training was influenced by Le Corbusier), Josep Torres Clavé, Subirana, Rodríguez Arias and Sixt Illescas, among others.
Together they created AC, Documentos de Arquitectura Contemporánea, a publication that was magnificently constructed from a graphic point of view, through which they spread a social theory of architecture and introduced into Spain the rationalist trends that opted for industrial production, economy of resources and functionalism.
Some of the members of the GATCPAC designed furniture based on these ideals, although it has to be said that these pieces never got beyond a restricted circle.
Although the history of Catalan design is yet to be studied in depth, it's safe to say that at that time there was no generalised design in the modern sense of the word. There were, however, a number of outstanding examples of what could be regarded as production processes that fit within our present-day concept of design. This is the case of Hispano-Suiza Fábrica de Automóviles Sociedad Anónima, founded in Barcelona by Emili de la Cuadra in 1898.
Throughout the twenties and up until 1936, Hispano-Suiza had succeeded in placing itself among Europe's top firms for the quality of its car manufacturing. The bright future that lay ahead was cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War, which spelt the paralysis of industrial design yet one of the peaks of graphic design. It's often said that the Spanish Civil War was a paper war, because it generated hundreds of publications of all sorts: from mural periodicals through political publications and posters to sophisticated, well-published magazines.
In this context, Barcelona became the main centre of propaganda activity, with the poster occupying pride of place. In fact, it was in Barcelona that the first Civil War poster was made. It was by designed by Carles Fontseré in the Draughtsmen's Union on the day following Franco's coup of 18 July 1936, in response to the graphic artists' desire to defend the Republican cause, fighting with the weapon they knew best: design.
The end of the War, with the fall of the Republic, paved the way for the Franco dictatorship, which dealt a serious blow to the development of design, linked as always to the economic situation, in this case a recession exacerbated by the regime of economic self-sufficiency imposed from the beginning of the War until 1957, which limited not only the importing but also the exporting of goods.
It was a period of isolation from the exterior, and the interior was subject to ideological control. This was particularly patent in the field of graphic design as, from the very start, Francoism exerted strict vigilance over the printed media, not only their content but even their aesthetic lines.
In this postwar scenario, fraught with difficulties, the FAD played a fundamental role. Its apolitical nature enabled it to act as an umbrella for the creation of the first groups interested in design.
The presence of the R group of architects was also crucial. It was formed in Barcelona in the fifties with the aim of establishing a link with the avant-garde architectural scene prior to the Civil War, more specifically the GATCPAC.
Two of the members of the R group, Oriol Bohigas and Antoni de Moragas, were particularly active in disseminating and defending the role of design and also in constructing its theory and practice.
As a result of this activity, 1956 saw an attempt to create the Barcelona Industrial Design Institute, an initiative that came up against numerous legal obstacles; remember that during Francoism any association was regarded as suspicious. The only way it could succeed was through the FAD, which gave it shelter as the Agrupación de Diseñadores Industriales FAD, better known today as ADIFAD.
One year later, the Delta Awards for industrial design were created and a new association was set up, also within the FAD: Grafistas Agrupación FAD (now ADGFAD, for graphic designers).
Design began to evolve towards its modern concept thanks to these associations, but also thanks to the gradual arrival in Barcelona of a number of foreign professionals, who began to settle down there as of the late forties, and especially in the sixties and seventies. These included Erwin Bechtold, Yves Zimmermann and, later on, America Sánchez, Ricardo Rousselot, Mario Eskenazi, Jorge Pensi and Alberto Lievore.
The appearance of these associations and the establishment of these professionals coincided with the end of the Francoist economic self-sufficiency policy, the launching of the Stabilisation Plan in 1959 and Spain's entry into the capitalist economy. The income levels of the population rose and a consumer society gradually emerged.
It was also around that time that a theory of design began to take shape, and several schools were founded in Barcelona, including the Elisava (1961) and Eina (1966) Schools, devoted exclusively to teaching design in its various different fields. The traditional schools like the Massana and the Llotja moved with the times, setting up design departments with design programmes and specific qualifications, at the same time evading the arts-and-crafts approach that had characterised them until then.
In the mid sixties, Grafistas Agrupación FAD and ADIFAD made a huge effort to reach people. To this end, the former organised public events of a very popular nature, such as putting up panels in the street showing work done by the members of the association, in an attempt to convey to people the value of design. In 1965 the latter set up, as part of the Architects' Association of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, a permanent information centre with the objective of clearing up the public's misgivings about industrial design.
Thus, Barcelona became a focal point for those professionals who were especially conscious of the value of design and its capacity to transform social reality. In the final throes of the Franco regime, design was perceived as an element of political opposition and an instrument of sufficient cultural importance as to be capable of raising awareness.
Fundació BCD, Barcelona Centre de Disseny, created in 1973, pioneered the promotion of design, and what came to be known as "design editors", companies like Disform and BD, that designed and marketed articles the production of which was farmed out, sprang up throughout the decade.
The death of Franco triggered a cultural explosion that, together with the recovery from the energy crisis of the mid seventies and the preparations for Spain's incorporation into Europe, made Barcelona the epicentre of design in Spain. Teams were established that were capable of offering highly specialised professional services, designers who had embarked on their career years earlier (André Ricard, Enric Satué, America Sánchez and others) consolidated their position, and so we arrived at the eighties, the so-called design boom.
Barcelona design now had official support. The City Council and the Catalan government involved themselves in promoting it, especially as of 1986, when Barcelona was chosen as the host city for the 1992 Olympic Games.
The city achieved worldwide recognition for its architecture, urban planning and design, which became an important part of its identity, all the more so with its consolidation thanks to a series of designers including Peret, Mariscal (best known for his Olympic mascot, Cobi), Pati Núñez, Alfonso Sostres, Claret Serrahima, Josep Maria Mir, Albert Isern, Pilar Villuendas and José Ramón Gómez, Pete Sans, Gemma Bernal, Ramon Benedito, Jaume Treserra, Josep Lluscà, Gabriel Teixidó, Ramon Isern, Òscar Tusquets and many more names that joined their ranks as the nineties approached.
The vitality of Barcelona design was admired in Spain and abroad, as can be seen from the large number of articles published by the specialised press in other countries.
However, after the Olympics the economic crisis that had been glowering for some time in Europe reached Spain and seriously affected design: many studios folded or were forced to adapt by cutting jobs drastically; the growth of the design editors was hampered and the big companies stopped asking for jobs, since in economically difficult times the first budget item to go is usually design, in accordance with the traditional misconception that design is an added value when really it is an intrinsic one, as Juli Capella is wont to say. And Barcelona, with the largest population of designers in Spain, not only was unable to escape the recession but was hit hard by it, possibly harder than elsewhere.
After the crisis, and even during it, Barcelona design came to occupy a preeminent place, on a par with that coming out of European cities such as London, Milan, Paris and Berlin. Having overcome that difficult moment - and now perhaps on the brink of another one - the city's design scene is going through a bright period as far as results are concerned, although not so much economically speaking, as there's a great deal of competition and the business world still doesn't trust design as much as it should. During the nineties a new generation of designers appeared with a heterogeneous practice and an open mentality: Ana Mir, Emili Padrós, Curro Claret, Martí Guixé, Martín Ruiz de Azúa, Víctor Juan, Òscar Guayabero, Miquel Puig, Mariona García, Sergi Ibáñez, Martí Abril, David Torrents, Andreu Balius and studios such as Gráfica, Cosmic, Actar, Eumo Gràfic, Base, Vasava and Planet Base, who are making their mark internationally with their bold, high-quality proposals.
To finish, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether Barcelona design has some special characteristic of its own. The answer would possibly be no, because in these times of heterodoxy and globalisation it's practically impossible to find native elements anywhere (without resorting to clichés). Nor can we find specific traces of style or unifying features, but what we can say is that the interest shown and the quality offered in Barcelona today are hard to find in many European cities, still less in the rest of Spain.

Page 24
Those eighties bars
by Ramon Úbeda Architect

Many readers will skip this page as soon as they see this title. Especially younger readers. It's understandable. So much has been said so many times about the famous bars of Barcelona in the golden age of the eighties that finally people have turned against them to a certain extent, in some cases because of overexposure and in others simply because generationally speaking it's expected of them. The more trendy and tendentious magazines are now beginning to pour vitriol on them, or rather on what's left of them, which unfortunately is none other than the worn-out and lamentable "designer" label. The term has been so abused that at this juncture it would appear to be impossible for it to regain its correct meaning. It's a lost cause. We all know that designer drugs really come from a laboratory, not a design studio, but the definition has become so popular that it even figures in the dictionaries. And we all ought to know that the interior of a bar, any bar, whether it's better or worse, whether it's from the seventies or the eighties or this century, is always the result of a project that has been thought out - designed - by somebody.
Designing is synonymous with thinking, creating, having ideas, and if possible having good ideas. And good ideas don't belong to a particular time. There have always been mythical bars. There always will be. Each period generates its own, and each generation preserves them in its memory as long as it can. Those who prowled the night in the sixties keep the flame of the Boccacio alight, and seventies names like Zeleste and Bikini are still alive and kicking. The eighties bars are still talked about because - and this merit is undeniable - they made a decisive contribution to the projection of the city, which at that time had something of a cultural inferiority complex due to the Madrid scene. Once again, the moon became creativity's best ally, and the late-night bars were the best showcase of the country's up-and-coming design. They changed look radically and were turned into temples of the night, dedicated to aesthetics and projected with such zeal that they almost became a branch of design, of which we could have boasted pioneer status and world leadership in those years.
At a time when the world hardly took any notice of the Café Costes designed by a fresh young Philippe Starck in Paris, we could spend the night hopping between the Metropol, Boliche, Líquid, Zig-Zag, Distrito Distinto, Universal and many many more. We could even choose between sophisticated and brash, between swish and sinister, between warm and cold, between baroque and industrial, many of them memorable. So wide a range and such sparkle was not altogether coincidental. The responsibility lies with a generation of architecture professionals who, faced with the logical shortage of large jobs that tends to be part and parcel of the beginnings of things, decided to focus their ingenuity on minor works of interior design, first in clothes shops and then in bars. Gabriel Ordeig and Tonet Sunyer designed the Bijou, Dani Freixas and Vicente Miranda the 33, Alfredo Vidal the KGB, Alfredo Arribas the Velvet, Eduardo Samsó the Nick Havanna… You only need to take a look at the subsequent career of all these professionals to see why those eighties bars are still talked about. If the legacy of the Boccacio was the generation of the PER studio (Lluís Clotet, Pep Bonet, Cristian Cirici, Mireia Riera and Òscar Tusquets), which in turn gave rise to firms like BD Ediciones de Diseño, and Zeleste brought to light figures such as Santiago Roqueta and Carlos Riart, to name but a few, the eighties bars were the safety valve for the creativity of a good number of designers who would later rise to fame.
Thanks to their work, the night-life entrepreneurs understood that investing in design could be good business, and so the idea snowballed. The Si Si Sí, Otto Zutz, Zsa-Zsa, Seltz, Rothko and many more popped up out of nowhere. On top of the work of the architects came that of fashion designers, artists and especially graphic designers, notably Alfonso Sostres, Pati Núñez, Claret Serrahima, Josep Bagá, America Sánchez and Peret, who designed logos, posters and even decorations. It was at this time that fliers were invented. Even before the name caught on, the Velvet used to hand out its weekly card, carefully designed like everything else in the bar. The Torres de Ávila was the apotheosis of detail, and also of pomp, exuberance and excess. This spectacular club in the Poble Espanyol was designed by Alfredo Arribas in collaboration with Javier Mariscal, with whom he'd already worked on the Gambrinus. Soon after that, Arribas designed the Standard, which swiftly fell by the wayside. Then came the rehashes and substitutes. The decline had begun... partly because of the difficulties the promoters were having in retrieving their huge investments, but also because an epoch was drawing to a close.
Today some people, especially among the younger generations, are derisive about the stainless steel urinals, complete with cascade, to be found in some of those bars. Naturally, they're fully entitled to urinate wherever the fancy takes them, but their critical spirit should try not to piss entirely out of the pot. Changes in tastes are not only giddily fast but also positive and necessary. Those eighties bars fulfilled their function, and they had the merit of putting Barcelona on the international design map. So much so that still today many of the city's visitors seek out those bars they once admired on glossy paper. They discover that many of them have changed and some no longer even exist. In their place they find a new range of bars that cater to new tastes. Time will tell whether they deserve to linger in our memory.

KGB Alegre de Dalt, 55.
The KGB, which stands for "Kiosko General de Barcelona", was one of the first clubs to become famous in the city. It was also among the most original and the most imitated. It has two storeys and occupies what used to be industrial premises (a textile dyeing and tinting works). Its cold "garage" aesthetic, common enough in the early eighties in cities like London and New York, was unprecedented in Barcelona, and soon set the trend. Alfredo Vidal, the promoter and also the architect who designed the club, wisely decided to retain certain features that gave away the original use of the building: the structure of the large windows (which were bricked up and used for advertising), the huge spaces with high ceilings, the cement floors and the unclad steel structures.
The logo is by America Sánchez, and the main elements of attraction in the club were the bars: one spectacular, illuminated and mobile, and the other consisting of industrial barrels painted in loud colours, which was taken out in one of the successive changes that have been made to the original architecture of the premises. It now operates as a disco and concert venue.

Si Si Sí Avda. Diagonal, 442.
This bar has changed name so many times that nobody recognises it any more, but for a long time it was known by its original name: Si Si Sí. It occupies the ground floor of a Modernista building on the Diagonal. It was contemporary with the KGB and at the same time its complete opposite conceptually. If the KGB represented the cold look, the Si Si Sí was at the other end of the spectrum: stylish, warm and friendly.
The long, narrow premises were skilfully and wisely worked out by Gabriel Ordeig, one of the most interesting professionals to have come out of Catalan design, and also responsible for the exquisite Bijou. In addition to being an interior designer, Ordeig was an excellent designer of lamps, as he showed with those he made specially for the Si Si Sí, subsequently copied to death. The rest of the furniture was designed by Carlos Riart, another unique character who left his mark in the form of tables and chairs. The design of this bar became a statement in favour of noble, warm materials, light, colour and also tradition, in the form of the stuccoed walls and the choice of hydraulic tiles for the meticulously designed and laid floor. All in all, the Si Si Sí was a credit to the noble building that housed it.

Velvet Balmes, 161.
This bar marked the beginning of the meteoric career of architect Alfredo Arribas. He was only 32 when he designed it, and at that time he felt a special fascination for the fifties look and films like Blue Velvet, which this bar was inspired by and named after. Arribas also openly admired the personality and designs of his Italian colleague Carlo Molino, to whom he paid homage by rescuing his designs for tables, chairs and stools for the furniture in Velvet.
In its cramped surface area, Velvet contained a universe of details. It's a baroque space with curves, velvety textures and intense colours. The antithesis of the cold bars and minimalist interior design that was already beginning to make their presence felt. This is one of the reasons why it's been one of the city's most popular bars, and at the same time one of those which has best withstood the passing of the years. The bar has two long entrances, one in the form of a suspended ramp, and in a glass box between them stand the toilets, with more surprises. Carrying on past sturdy Gresite-clad columns, you come to the main area, overlooked by a long bar. Light filters through alabaster screens, and the whole space conveys an agreeable feeling of warmth that invites you to try out the small dance floor in the centre.

Gambrinus Moll de la Fusta, 12.
Alfredo Arribas has always had the knack of surrounding himself with good collaborators. He knows how to choose those who work in his studio on a daily basis, and Miguel Morte is one of them. He also likes to invite other professionals to travel with him on his adventures. On the Gambrinus adventure he teamed up with Javier Mariscal for the first time, and the resulting happy relationship is still on the go today.
Gambrinus was one of a series of five chiringuitos or waterfront establishments that were dotted along the Moll de la Fusta, the first area in Barcelona harbour that was reclaimed for the city, long before the 1992 Olympics. All the chiringuitos were identical on the outside, but the Gambrinus could be told from the rest by the sculpture of a prawn that Mariscal and Arribas put on the roof. There were seaside motifs on the inside too: the bar was in the shape of a ship's hull. The furniture on the terrace, which looked as if it had been reconstructed from the remains of a wrecked pirate ship, also bore Mariscal's unmistakable mark. The premises was put to all the uses - restaurant, bar and finally after-hours club - before succumbing to the pickaxe. All that was rescued was the giant cartoon prawn, now safely stored away until it finds a new home.

Nick Havanna Rosselló, 208.
From the design point of view, this was one of the best resolved, most exemplary projects of the many that have given the Catalan capital its reputation. At that time, Eduardo Samsó was a young architect, meticulous and with a fine eye for detail, and was already renowned for his projects for several fashion shops. He was lucky enough to meet the resourceful night-life promoter Javier de las Muelas, who put at his disposition a spacious locale and a comfortable budget to make this bar, with its name that made you think of some tropical adventurer, come true.
Samsó elaborated a project that was full of references and details; the use of metal and concrete, the frieze of red stars, the cowskin facing on the bars, the mural of TV screens, the bluish dome from which hangs a pendulum designed by Ingo Maurer… and particularly the toilets, which instead of the usual neglected, utilitarian space, was made into one of the bar's many attractions. As occurred in other leisure facilities, Nick Havanna was no less than a test zone for creativity, and the design of the toilets was one of its most notable feats... including that cataract in the urinals that's so criticised by those who define the new trends.

Snoocker Club Roger de Llúria, 42.
The Snoocker Club was along the same lines as the Si Si Sí: a bar-cum-club where, in this case, in addition to having a drink you could practice the game of the same name. The likenesses between the two bars isn't surprising when you find out that the designer Carlos Riart and the architect Santiago Roqueta worked on both. They were accompanied on this project by Oleguer Armengol and Víctor Mesalles.
Warm, noble materials (ebony, elm root, beech), light, mirrors, the convex ceiling and the wavy bar made the Snoocker Club a bar with personality, designed by veteran professionals in search of a place to meet on the Barcelona late-night scene that would be quiet, welcoming and also in tune with the age of its generation: those who in the sixties and seventies used to lean on the bars of the mythical Bocaccio and Zeleste.

Otto Zutz Lincoln, 15.
The Otto Zutz was opened just before the Snoocker Club and was also conceived as a club... although in a very different line. It was designed to attract the city's most colourful fauna, and its cosmopolitan space broke the established rules once again. Like the KGB, it was set in what had once been an industrial building, but in this case the surface area was much larger and spread over several storeys, and the architectural project rested on rich plays of light and shadow. In fact, the Zutz spotlight, reminiscent of a huge car headlight, was specially designed for this club. Another particularity of this cosmopolitan club, opened in 1985, was that it published its own night-life newsletter with a tabloid format: Hora Zutz. The graphic and communication design, by Alfonso Sostres, was another of the reasons for its success.
The ground floor was originally occupied by the dance floor. The flooring material was ipe, a wood that some Amazonian tribes use to build their houses on rivers and lakes, and that according to good dancers is the best surface to dance on, owing to its balance between hardness and elasticity. The first floor was characterised by its mural paintings by the artist Vicenç Viaplana, which no longer exist but once decorated its enormous walls. Viaplana painted them in black, white and grey only, using a broom. The top floor of the Otto Zutz housed the privé, a space with a warmer feel where meals were also served.

Torres de Ávila Marquès de Comillas, 25.
The prestige that Alfredo Arribas earned for himself with the Velvet and the Gambrinus paved the way for a job like the Torres de Ávila, in which he was given a blank cheque to do whatever his imagination (and that of Mariscal, which isn't chickenfeed) could come up with. And he did it. The project wasn't easy, as it had to fit into the two mock mediaeval towers that led into the Poble Espanyol.
Not a stone was left undesigned. Arribas deployed all possible technical and scenographic resources: a catwalk hung from wires for access from the street; a transparent pyramid - like the one in the Louvre - to cover the space between the two towers; suspended platforms wrapped in optical fibre; a whole catalogue of furniture designed specially for the bar; a transparent lift for access to the roof terrace with its wonderful views over the city... sheer baroque exuberance. More than a bar, the Torres de Ávila was an overwhelming stage set that took the formula to the limit. Unfortunately, over the years many of the elements that made up the great show that this bar came to be have disappeared.

Zsa Zsa Rosselló, 156.
The ground plan of the Zsa Zsa was similar to that of the Velvet. It's a common arrangement in this part of Barcelona, as the ground floor of the buildings is almost always divided in two by the communal stairwell. As a result, the bar has two narrow symmetrical entrances from the facade, providing access to the main back area of the bar, which although rectangular and fairly regular, also features a number of obstacles including the structural columns that support the building.
The stairwell and the columns are two of the problems that the architect had to solve a priori on tackling the project. For the Zsa Zsa, Dani Freixas and Vicente Miranda lined the walls with a collage of classical rugs designed by Peret, who was also responsible for the bar's graphic design. The columns were clad in a bright suit of stainless steel. The rest of the design was pure magic, because the bar changed appearance when you least expected it. This sensation of changeableness was achieved thanks to effects produced (in six different programmed sequences) by light on the double side walls, which were surfaced with a special reflecting glass that acted as a mirror or a light source depending on how light fell on it. When it was transparent it revealed rows of bottles. This ingenious arrangement earned its makers the FAD Prize for Interior Design.

Salero Rec, 60.
The Torres de Ávila marked the end of an era. After the Olympics came the recession, and the times of big budgets were over. As was the great pageant outlandish design. Austerity was back, although not necessarily accompanied by minimalism. A good example of the beginning of this turnaround is the Salero, one of the first establishments to opt to set up business in the newly revamped Ribera district. It was also one of the pioneers of the formula of combining the functions of bar and restaurant, which eventually proved so successful in the night-life of this popular part of the city.
The Salero revived the quiet, softly lit restaurant with white walls, where sophisticated light fittings are replaced with the simplicity of candlelight, and where the rehabilitated areas are unashamed to show off their original structure and the scars left on them over the years. The design of the restaurant was by Pilar Líbano, a prestigious and veteran interior designer who bases her style on a great respect for the past, that place where many creators sometimes sketch the future.

Present and future
Even the most nostalgic amongst us are aware that eventually there will be no more of those eighties bars that gradually degenerate with each successive change of ownership and clientele until one night you find them closed. All those nostalgic souls also know that it's time to move on, no matter how many of us think it wouldn't be such a bad idea if one or two of those mythical bars, Bijou in particular, were restored to their former glory, if only as a homage to Gabriel Ordeig.
The phenomenon is unlikely to repeat itself. Lavish overspending gave way to lean budgets, with just enough resources even in the best of cases, so it's difficult for designers to shine more brightly than those we find in other cities elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, places with a certain amount of glitter are back in again, this time thanks to the interior design professionals, and often also the warmth of a new formula combining dinner and drinks - the restaurant and the club with dance floor - whether it's to the sounds of a dj session or an orchestra.
It's encouraging to see the way this particular option is growing. Examples of it are the Tatí, designed by the veteran Pepe Cortés, the Oven, by Antoni Arola, and the Noti, by Francesc Pons. These three establishments, located in different areas of the city - Diagonal, Eixample and Poblenou - and created by interior designers from different generations, are highly recommendable for those still prone to attacks of nostalgia.

Page 32
The stars about us.
by Òscar Guayabero

This is not going to be "the history of object design". It's going to be my wanderings through the design of objects - to be more exact, domestic objects, those that form part of our domestic or daily environment and therefore have the closest links with us. It will include those pieces that have interested me most, those that I find most brilliant or significant, although there are no grounds or complaint on behalf of those that don't appear here; this is only a history, not History itself.
The setting for this subjective jaunt (as opposed to study) will be the city of Barcelona, taking it as our point of reference. And we'll start with two pieces that I discovered at the same time, and for me represent the beginning of our history of contemporary objects.
When I was little, I loved to look at a magazine my father subscribed to. It was an American magazine called Popular Mechanics, and for me it was the utmost exponent of modernity. Years later I discovered that the publication had a more than suspiciously conservative streak. Anyway, at that time, I was fascinated by that mixture of bungalows, fishing tackle, prefab houses, reports on the new guns being tried out in Vietnam and DIY tips.
In that magazine I simultaneously discovered two chairs:
The first was in a report on how skyscrapers were built, specifically some of those by Mies van der Rohe, and in one part of the article there was the Barcelona chair, designed by Mies for the German Pavilion in the 1929 Universal Exhibition. I was struck by the name, and more so by the fact that it was designed to be sat in by a king, Alfonso XIII of Spain (who in the end didn't get to sit in it, incidentally). Obviously, the designer wasn't Catalan, and doubt could even be cast as to whether the chair was really mass-produced, because its manufacture had more in common with craftsmanship than with an industrial process, but nevertheless, this piece has stood as a milestone for the concept that has been given to design in Catalonia. It contains the best and the worst of the so-called rationalism that ruled over our design and architecture for decades.
The second chair was in an advertisement. One of the things you could buy by mail order was the BKF easy chair (1938), designed by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari. Although the piece was created in Buenos Aires and two of its designers were Argentinian architects, there is also a direct Barcelona connection, as Bonet trained as a designer in this city, in the workshop of Josep Lluís Sert, with whom he codesigned the Pavilion of the Republic in the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1937. This simple chair with its organic appearance enshrined for me the hope that another way of conceiving objects was possible. Quite apart from its extremely long commercial life - it's still produced today - it exerted an important influence for generations. I know all this now, but then all I knew was that it was the strangest chair I'd ever seen. I always wanted to have one and I still do now; I've never managed to have a house to match. I suppose one mustn't give up hope.
Another thing I learnt later on was that the avant-garde wealth and activity of the members of the GACTPAC that Josep Lluís Sert led were wiped off the map by the fratricidal Spanish Civil War and its bloody and repressive postwar period. In their wake remained the fantastic workers' beach huts, Roca the jewellers on Passeig de Gràcia and that Spanish pavilion at the Paris exhibition.
A case apart is the furniture that is now generically called Pedrera, designed by Barba Corsini for the apartments in Casa Milà, also known as the Pedrera, between 1953 and 1955. I won't waste this opportunity to call for its restoration, as necessary, if not more so, as that of Gaudí's apartment block for which it was made. Although it was an exercise in style, this furniture deserves a place in the history of design, or at least in this one.
It wasn't until the late sixties that we reached the minimum conditions for the mass production of objects to resurface. This is especially visible if we take a look at the first edition of the Delta Awards, set up by the ADIFAD (Association of Industrial Designers), in 1961. Since then the Delta Awards have been a point of reference, often subject to criticism, of the history of object design in the city.
Those first awards (1961-62) included some of the most interesting and influential pieces that our modest history has had, probably because they featured not only the designs produced in the years concerned, 1961 and 62, but also some from previous years.
Perhaps the most outstanding case of this was the Coderch lamp (1957). Josep Antoni Coderch picked up the pieces of the GATCPAC, and among his many contributions we find this magnificent lamp. This piece is a product of its time, when simplicity was a necessity rather than an option. Yet the result has a subtlety that has made it endure over time.
In the same year, another award went to the Marquina cruet set, by Rafael Marquina (1961). The day I discovered that the cruet set we had at home had been designed by somebody, and what's more, he'd done it before I was born, I understood that this business of making objects was kind of fun. The cruet set we had at home was probably a copy; not for nothing was this piece one of the most plagiarised in the history of design.
What was brilliant about Marquina's design was that he adapted equipment taken from a chemistry laboratory for use in the home without it seeming unnatural. The idea of avoiding dribbling (basic in chemistry) provides an apparently anodyne object with a solution that still today is unbetterable.
The harvest of the 1961-62 Delta Awards doesn't end there; the TMC lamp (1960) by Miguel Milà was also given a Delta d'Or. Maybe because I'd always seen it in the homes of my friends (heirs of the Catalan bourgeoisie), I never saw the attraction of this lamp until I lived with one. Now I'm hard pushed to find better standard lamps than the TMC, especially in its metal version.
Maybe something similar has happened to me with the Impala motorbike (1962). I admit that for years I deliberately ignored this icon that stood halfway between the stale legacy of the gauche divine and the novels of Juan Marsé on the one hand and the bike's unnecessary albeit successful relaunching in the form of the Impala2 on the other. But if you stop and take a look at the feeble Spanish automobile industry at that time, you can't help but be amazed that Leopoldo Milà could have designed it. Only the Cota 247, designed by him in 1968, could outshine it.
I don't want to move on without returning for a moment to the Barcelona chair. As I was saying, it contains the best (no mean feat, making a sober, naked chair like that for a king) and the worst (its simplicity is more of a facade than a reality, as each chair was handmade, with a load of polished weld joints and so on). As I've always felt closer to commoners than kings, I was delighted to discover that Federico Correa and Alfonso Milà had designed a Barceloneta chair in 1958. This is the rationalism I like; it uses local techniques and without sacrificing simplicity gives it a character of its own.
After this first rush, production systems were modernised and it became possible to make plastic objects using injection moulds. It was then that André Ricard appeared with his Swiss rationalism and his admiration for Raymond Loewy, and gave us some of the sixties' best objects: the Arce ice tongs (1964), the Copenhagen ashtray (1965) and the Tatu lamp (1972). In particular, I can't get over the Arce tongs. The economy of means and the way they turn the problem round (it's the material and not the user that makes the effort) still surprises me. Ricard has been one of the most orthodox voices in design, but no less lucid for that, and for me his texts and his objects are equally important (don't forget the Quorum perfume bottle he did for Puig). He was one of the conceptual foundations of design, and although I've never had a close rapport with him personally, he forms part of my - and our - past.
We'll have to skip 10 years to find another sweet spot of design. Those who are old enough to remember say the last throes of the dictatorship were exciting times. And architecture and design are a reflection of what's going on in the rest of society. From rationalism, finally accepted by the obtuse regime, we moved on into an eclectic, cosmopolitan and liberating postmodernity.
I remember when I used to snog with who must have been my first girlfriend, in a cold, desolate square in the district of La Sagrera. Little did I know then that we were sitting on a Banco Catalano (1974), and it annoyed me that I couldn't turn round and stick my legs out the back in order to get in a better position for snogging. That must be one of the few defects of this magnificent public bench. Òscar Tusquets and Lluís Clotet managed to synthesise a good many of design's enigmas in this bench. The form (simple ergonomics and an elegant outline), the minimum use of material (sheet metal) for the production system (déployé, stretching a stamped metal sheet to give it a concertina effect) and the end result (transparency and continuity with space) make it still one of the best pieces of street furniture. This duo came up with some of the best objects of the seventies, including the Hialina shelf unit (1974), the Versàtil TV trolley (1976) and the BD extractor hood (1979). I've never understood how these architects (one half of the PER studio), who were so spot on with their objects, lost vitality in their architectural work, although we shouldn't forget that together with Cristian Ciciri and Pep Bonet they were the spearhead of postmodernity.
Years after my carnal exploits on the Catalano, another girl was to provide me with the opportunity to live with a table made by the other half of the PER studio. For a couple of years I ate lunch and dinner at the Sevilla table (1976), designed by Pep Bonet and Cristian Cirici, and I have to confess that sometimes I miss it. I miss its apparent simplicity and complexity of design, seeking the best position for the legs so they don't get in the way, and its efficient system of stability by means of a regulator on the fourth leg to make up for uneven floors (a table that never wobbles!).
The seventies were seen out with two small lamps. The first is my beloved Gira lamp (1978) designed by Josep Tremoleda and Josep Maria Massana. It was my first object designed by somebody I knew. I bought it and it's still with me on my bedside table.
The second is a delicious, exquisite little toy: the Prima lamp (1979) designed by Pete Sants. It's one of those lamps that provide company rather than light. Its spirit of minima and a poetic je ne sais quoi made it one of my favourites while I studied for my degree.
Then, just when everything was going fine, came the eighties, with their commercial functionalism on the one hand and their aestheticist modernity on the other.
"Serious" designers appeared, concerned with the market and production systems. This group defended a rationalistic attitude and a functional design, in confrontation with the other emergent group, the modern designers.
I knew nothing about this mess when I started at the Massana School in 1986, but like the rest of my generation, I had to sit through insufferable debates on the definition of design. Vinçon, the cathedral of design at the time, had spent the seventies doing some veritable avant-garde trailblazing, and now opted for modernity, making its exhibition hall the meeting place. Manufacturers like BD and Mobles 114 still stood halfway between industrial craftsmanship and modernity. The Delta Awards veered towards functionalism. It was at this time that something of a split appeared between the ADIFAD and the visible design scene as represented by the sector's publications. Juli Capella and Quim Larrea played a vital role here as catalysts, with publications that constituted the showcase of the so-called eighties boom, first with the magazine DeDiseño and later with Ardi. This decade, so inflated by institutions and the press and so excessively criticised subsequently, has bequeathed us some objects that are nevertheless memorable, or at least rememberable, which is what matters in the end.
Perhaps the most venerated and at the same time the most slighted eighties object is the Dúplex stool by Javier Mariscal. Although it wasn't produced until a year later, Mariscal designed this stool for a bar in Valencia in 1980. This apparently innocent piece of furniture shook some of the supposed foundations of design. It should be stressed that it was made a year before the Memphis movement started in Milan, and it constituted a precursor of many of the imprints they would leave. The playful, demythologising spirit of these objects proved controversial, and in fact some still say that this isn't design. Whatever the truth of the matter, these kind of objects are, as Mariscal put it in the title of an exhibition of his, "Tickles for your Eyes". And that's good enough for me.
Straight after that came Òscar Tusquets again, with the Varius chair (1982), starting a new category of objects, the "superhits". I wouldn't like to say whether this chair is good design, but we've seen it so often that it forms part of our landscape, and there must be some reason for that. The same is true of another chair that, much as I don't like it, it would be absurd to shy away from mentioning. I'm talking about what was possibly the biggest "superhit" in Catalan design: the Toledo chair (1988) by Jorge Pensi. At this point we should mention the manufacturing companies; both Casas in the case of the Varius and Amat in that of the Toledo were farsighted enough to make large investments on moulds and new production systems for the designs proposed, and afterwards they knew the right way to go about marketing the product, as the businesses grew with the snowballing sales of their star products. The reason I mention the manufacturers is because if there's one thing in short supply on the Barcelona design scene, it's brave and intelligent businesses that go for new proposals.
I remember the first time I went to one of those so-called designer bars. They were what really stirred things up in the eighties. Network, Velvet, Otto Zutz, Nick Havanna and all the others. I was a student then, and I wasn't going to miss a thing. We went to those bars almost with notebook in hand, looking and touching everything. It was in one of those bars that I first sat on a brilliant joke in the form of a stool: the Frenesi (1986) by the Transatlàntic group (Ramón Benedito, Lluís Morillas and Josep Puig), an object intended for bars that played with the eroticism inherent in the atmosphere of barstools and cocktails. It was criticised at the time for being frivolous. It certainly is, but aren't late-night bars meant to be?
Amid all this mayhem, more than a few howlers were committed; furniture that with hindsight doesn't stand up to serious analysis. Nevertheless, from Valencia came the proposals of Vicent Martínez. Although he wasn't from Barcelona, his designs had an important influence on our surroundings, both professionally and through the manufacturers, Punt Mobles. The Literatura shelf unit (1985) and the Anaconda table (1989) formed a point of reference for creative sobriety. This Valencian designer showed an uncommon ingenuity, and his furniture was more than just skin-deep. He took a fresh look at how it worked.
These were times when anything went, or so it seemed. You could even make a table out of a drawing pin; the Chincheta table (1988) by Òscar and Sergi Devesa looked like a joke, until we discovered Oldenburg and his book of matches in the district of Vall d'Hebron, and saw that maybe it wasn't so frivolous to change the scale of objects.
Then somebody gave me an Aladina lamp (1988) by Gabriel Teixidó. It was the first time somebody had managed to update the desk lamp with a measure of dignity, especially the version with an incandescent bulb. Don't forget, the eighties were also the beginning of the cult of halogen lamps, which although they're more effective for some particular cases, tend to be more expensive, less practical and have a worse performance than the old light bulbs. You only had to look at some of the shops of the time, especially the Bulevard Rosa arcade, where the shop assistants were often out in the corridor to get away from the heat given off by the halogen bulbs.
Barcelona was busy getting ready for the Olympics, undoubtedly a milestone in our history. The great publicity that the event gave the city worldwide (it still lingers today) contrasts with the bleakness of the design scene after 1992 and a crisis that may not have been open but was nonetheless symptomatic, and has left some yawning gaps in its wake. But let's not get ahead of ourselves... back to our little history of objects.
Òscar Tusquets came back onto the scene with a controversial piece of furniture. The Ali-Babà divan (1989) provoked a debate that, looking back, was futile. Some said it was a version of a piece from the 17th or 18th century. So where's the problem? As if we designers weren't constantly revisiting images from the past! Anyway, this sofa-cum-rug proposed a new way of occupying the living room, and moreover performed a stylistic twist by giving form to a rug. Tusquets had got it right again.
That same year a new material appeared: Maderon, made of almond shells and resins. It can be injected in the same way as plastic, but gives a result that is similar to wood. Its possibilities astounded us with the Rothko chair (1989) by Alberto Liebore.
In 1991, under the umbrella of Casa Barcelona, one of the initiatives that did most to activate the sector, we find a new object: a multifocal mirror. The Mirallmal mirror by Eduard Samsó (an architect and interior designer known for his designs for commercial premises) was a sort of domestic kaleidoscope that successfully took a new look at a type of furniture that had remained unchanged for years.
The Delta Awards gave a prize to a contrivance that was strange but pleasing to the eye. The Ona hanger (1992) by Montse Padrós and Carles Riart came as a reminder that it was possible to rethink household objects that seemed immovable.
Then, as I mentioned earlier, the Olympics filled the city with new neighbourhoods, TVs and tourists. Once those memorable summer days had passed, the city turned in on itself. We were satisfied with what they'd achieved, they'd captivated the whole world, but we contemplated our navel for too long. The institutions didn't support the design that had given the city such a good image, and the companies saw no further than the profits from their sales. Manufacturers were only interested in designers of recognised prestige, those that a decade before had been the enfants terribles, and the same professionals as always. So in the nineties we find, time and time again, the same names as before. This brought about the phenomenon of the "deindustrialisation" of designers. If the companies didn't trust them, they'd have to look for new means. As Enric Ruiz Geli said about architecture (which is suffering a similar situation), they'll have to look for new sites to build their ideas on.
This, along with a certain amount of saturation among designers regarding furniture that no longer meet the needs of the contemporary home, in which nomadism, sustainability, economy of subsistence, lack of space, playful recycling and so on are as important as aesthetics and comfort (or more so), has brought about a new sort of designer, more open, more multidisciplinary, further removed from the commercial circuit. This is why so little novel furniture appears; there are plenty of correct designs, of course, but nothing surprising.
In spite of everything, Javier Mariscal continued to draw a reality to match his comics, with the series of Amorosos sofas (1995-1997) for the prestigious firm Moroso.
Joan Gaspar and Cristian Díez created a new kind of light with the Sac system (1999), somewhere between the ceiling light, the standard lamp and the wall light.
In 2001, Alberto Liebore designed one of the most beautiful and exciting benches to be made in years. The Areo bench is not only a technical masterpiece but a feast for the eyes.
Niall O'Flynn, who has made Barcelona his home, exemplifies what I'm saying. In the absence of a firm that believed in his designs, he started up his own production company with his Rascal chair (1997), based on the typical mudscrapers to be found at many front doors.
Another member of this same generation, Martí Guixé, is one of the designers who has gone furthest in his exploration of new ground, from food to games, from a reflection on brands to shoes. He is perhaps the spearhead of a series of designers who, as I was saying, have opted to stay away from the furniture and household object manufacturers and retailers and move closer the world of art galleries.
One of his few "orthodox" objects is his H2O chair (1999), made by a Barcelona gallery and producer that is notable for having opted for the avant-garde. However, his actions, installations and so on are equally important if not more so. These often become very open little gadgets which the user actually puts into practice, for example his Autoband adhesive tape (1999).
In the same line, Emili Padrós and Ana Mir set up a studio which has been responsible for such diverse designs as bathroom tiles with hairs attached, the interior of an aeroplane and a prize-giving ceremony.
Their Flying Carpet (2002) is an example of how a satellite sector of the furniture industry, in this case the rug and carpet manufacturers Nani Marquina, can help to construct a household object and at the same time put forward a new way of using the living room.
Martín Ruiz de Azúa, a contemporary of the Mir-Padrós duo, has created a personal and subtle object world, in part based on speculation and art. Perhaps his best-known piece, La Casa Básica (1999), is also the most virtual. As is the case with his contemporaries, his work is often more recognised abroad. Only some of his objects have been produced, amongst them the Rebotijo pitcher (1999), and this rereading of an ancestral container has had a certain amount of commercial success.
Víctor Juan with his Vinçon-made and widely known bag-light, Curro Claret and myself, Òscar Guayabero, complete this open and heterodox group. It's difficult to talk about objects today because, as I was saying before, most of them aren't produced, so we have to talk about people. Our proposals often fill the magazines and the programmes of events like Spring Design, but not the shops.
But fortunately now others are starting to arrive on the scene: Eugeni Quitllet (Oli-bri cruet set, 1999), currently working with the Philippe Starck studio, Jordi Llopis (Life light, 1999), Nathalie Danton, a Frenchwoman living in Barcelona and working for Equipage, Ernest Parera and his studio D-forma (Slepper slippers, 2000), a multidisciplinary group who have created the brand Dmano, producing and distributing bags made out of the canvas banners that are hung off the city's streetlights, Elies Bonet and his multidisciplinary studio La Creativa... and many others who keep appearing.
The challenge that confronts us now is how to get companies to opt for these new generations, to ensure the future of the country's furniture design and adapt to the new needs that have arisen and will continue to arise in the market.

Page 42
From the industrial ugly to idiotic beauty
by Juli Capella

"The transformation of music into noise is a planetary process, through which humanity is entering the historic phase of total ugliness"
Milan Kundera
The architect and critic Alessandro Mendini recently published an article in the Italian press entitled Bello, ma stupido, clearly a reference to the present state of international design.
As designers, we're supposed to seek a more beautiful environment. It's our duty, which is why we criticise our surroundings so ferociously for not exciting us, aesthetically speaking. Thus was born a dictatorship, the dictatorship of taste, which fortunately is broken cyclically by the inexorable law of the pendulum. There are times when we exalt beauty, and there are others when we relegate it in favour of taste. With this trick, everything always fits inside, and everything stays outside.
Let's take a look at the ups and downs of it. At the end of the 19th century it was clear that the beautiful was the artistic, and the industrial the ugly. There was a struggle to defend the Fine Arts against the invasion of the clumsy mass-produced object. But the avant-gardes of the twenties turned this on its head: the beautiful is that which is useful. And so, automatically, whatever was functional was necessarily beautiful: in the words of Otto Wagner, "Nothing that is not practical can be beautiful." But curiously, many designs, as they gained in beauty, lost in comfort. Has anybody tried Mies van der Rohe's elegant Barcelona chair? Futurism had already praised the machine above any Adonis, and had declared war on decoration. Then came the fashion of organicism, when the beautiful was that which already existed in nature. Sinusoidal curves, breaks - but always harmonious, natural ones. The Nordic countries are still living off this inexhaustible, never-ending quarry... Arne Jacobsen was categorical about it: "For a long time it's been said that if something's functional then it's also beautiful; I don't think that at all, because there are many ways of solving a functional problem. Beauty is something totally different." A century earlier, Théophile Gautier had been more belligerent: "There is no authentic beauty other than that which has no utility. All that is useful is ugly, since it is the expression of some need, and the needs of man are ignoble and unpleasant."
Then came the Germans, who imposed their vision of beauty as "gute Form". The small electrical appliances made by Braun were its paradigm; pure technological beauty, formulated by industrial know-how. Ultimately, a rationalist rehash with programmatic airs. But soon the Italians came and conquered with the invention they called "Bel Design", that special harmonious touch, that rafinatezza, something undefinable that has put Italian taste on top from the postwar period to the present day. Objects, graphics, buildings, suits, even perfumes, that emanate the elegance of their creator: a demiurge on the shoulders of astute industrialists, dictating from the Piedmont what is be taken as beauty, from Manhattan to Polynesia.
The "Radical Design" of Mendini, Archigram and Global Tools made a stand against style. The concept, the idea, had to be more important than the form. But postmodernism gatecrashed along with aesthetic liberation, successfully becoming a popular style through its indiscriminate piles of colours, forms and textures and free use of history. It even had cultured bubbles of high quality like the early stages of Sottsass's Memphis, which served to remind us that black and beige are not the only Pantones. Symbolism had got rid of the functional. In contrast, the high-tech offered a new and beautiful universe based on the direct expression of technological progress. Then came a flood of other isms: bolidism, neobrutalism, postindustrial neocraftsmanship, the various revivals, ethnicism… Also deconstructivism, a deliberate uglyism that reminds us of Rimbaud's verse: "One afternoon I sat Beauty on my knee. And I found her bitter. And I insulted her." A challenge to constructive processes, taking the possibilities of computers to the limit, to show that today any whim can be created, no matter how complex. Buildings aren't demolished any more - they're deconstructed. Here anything goes, because the laws of composition are enigmatic or mad, houses are twisted, tables lean, glasses are unstable, and if you think a catalogue is unreadable, it's not badly designed - you haven't understood it.
And of course, the pendulum swung back again, and so arrived boring minimalism. Everything white and everything flat and everything monomaterial ("Wouldn't want to get it wrong!"). The occasional interesting find surrounded by thousands of clones, a style where the lazy and above all the unimaginative can take refuge. The minimal never fails, all you have to do is do virtually nothing and paint it all white ("Hey, there are more than 50 kinds of white, according to the Eskimos!")... It's the case of 90% of today's clothes shops. The Italians sardonically say: "Minimale?… non fa male."
Next came the ethnic, the more exotic the better. Vivid, geometric psychedelia was back, the mix with the artistic, user participation... In other words, a bit of everything, nothing dominant and nothing outstanding.
We've had some surprises in the last few years, when the search for beauty has returned to its absence for inspiration... What is more beautiful: Ron Arad's brutalist furniture made of scrap, David Carson's chaotic graphics, or photogenic empty interiors? Is it right to want to be beautiful, or should we try to be good and see what happens?

The ugly doesn't sell?
At the beginning of the 1950s the celebrated French-born American industrial designer Raymond Loewy published an autobiography entitled Never leave well enough alone. The Spanish edition was published in 1955 by Iberia, with a cover design by the graphic designer Ricard Giralt-Miracle, and somebody - possibly Manuel Scholz Rich, who is credited as the translator... from the German version! - had the bright idea of translating the title as "Lo feo no se vende" (The ugly doesn't sell). Whoever was responsible for it, the phrase caught on as a slogan to sing the praises of design, then a new profession that nobody had much idea about. What Loewy was saying, more or less, was that, confronted with two objects of the same quality, function and price, people always choose the most attractive. In other words, if I stand in front of a supermarket shelf piled high with packets of detergent, in the end I'll go for the one I most like the look of. If I have to choose between two telephones, I'll take the one that'll look nicest on the living room table. Loewy was selling sales; he was promising that if we embellish an object's shell the consumer is going to fall for it ipso facto. That's what we call "styling", the search for empathic forms that soften up the buyer. A purely epidermal thing, and as such, bad design. A little later on another Frenchman, Philippe Starck, went one step further, raising deceit to the category of high art: he got people to decorate their homes with little Giacometti-like sculptures that were supposed to serve as orange-squeezers. His aim was to offer objects that were "b-b", beaux and at the same time bons. He didn't say anything about "b for bon marché". And maybe the beautiful does sell more, but the ugly's a very close second. Take a look round El Corte Inglés.

Death to the ugly
In today's marketplace you can find anything, and anything sells. But in our line of work, we hate it when people like what we like. If a chair sells like hot cakes, that's enough to consider it a botched job. If a logo is instantly understandable, it's a dead loss. If people in the street like a building, it must be a reprehensible postmodern eyesore. In hardly a decade, Alessi's proposals have gone from formal sophistication to infantiloid trash. We walk down the street and nearly everything makes us gag. If we find out that somebody's got the same lamp as us, our hair stands on end. The object is shot down in flames, it becomes ugly overnight, it falls into disgrace. We would rather die than have the same taste as the concierge. We can't stand Mariscal any more, or Foster, or anyone who's succeeded and means something and is identified. We hunt high and low for the rare, the unique, the new, the different, no matter what. And as soon as it becomes popular and gets mass-produced, move on to pastures new. Our cravings are cruel but logical: the framework in which we live pushes us on at a giddy pace of renewal. Ethical criteria no longer stand, let alone aesthetic ones. The famous canons have vaporised. Woe betide he who dares to say, "I like this because it's beautiful." It's the uncoolest thing in the world to prefer something for its appearance.

Too much design?
If everything's already been done and done again, why keep spewing forth new forms?...
Whenever somebody exclaims there's too much design, it makes me want to make him unwrap a shrink-wrapped CD there and then, or take him to my house to open a packet of rice for me or explain how in God's name the remote control on the TV works. All these and many more objects are ugly, hideously ugly - even if they're beautiful - and should be redesigned. The same happens with millions of absurd pretty objects, clones of each other, and with banal buildings without any differential contribution on either a practical or a sentimental level. We should also rethink the city's street signs, the undersized museum tags, and the dangerous motorway panels that attempt to tell us the price of petrol at different service stations. Try taking that in at 180 - sorry, the speed limit's 120 - kilometres an hour. When somebody crashes, then they'll realise the folly of it. Some designer must be guilty for that, together with a negligent client who commissioned and accepted it. There are always at least two guilty parties: the one who had the idea, and the one who makes it. And then thousands of victims who buy it.
According to Mendini the blame lies with "a design that renounces depth, critical and self-critical reflection, a moral view of future worlds: everything is acquiescent, convenient, collaborative, rampant, homologous with hyperconsumption, with subreproduction, with the museum shop. Design has become "unthought", in the etymological sense, bereft of thought and theory. It just arrives, with a vacuous aestheticising mannerism, a de luxe minimalism that floats in unconscious nothingness... It has declined to face up to basic anthropological problems..."
There isn't too much design; there's too much bad design, design that's ugly without meaning to be. There are too many millions of stupid products. And many of the tools around us need to be substantially improved. That's good news for the sector, for the designers, for the industrialists. But above all, it's great news for the users: from now on we're going to give them better devices. And they'll be gorgeous. Or hideous, depending on their criteria. But they'll definitely be better. Design has only just begun.
For the time being, let's take a leaf out of the book of the grand old man, William Morris, who to a large extent is responsible for all this fuss of design: "Have nothing in your home which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." That way we'll have a good synthesis for the traditional beauty-utility dilemma that got us so flustered last century and is threatening to do so again in this one.

Page 46
The Design Museum, an element for a new centrality
by Oriol Bohigas Architect

This project, now in the execution phase, has developed from a twofold starting point: on the one hand, Barcelona City Council's urban planning scheme for Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, and on the other, the museological and organisational criteria formulated by the Culture Institute, also part of the City Council, under the directorship of Jordi Pardo. On the basis of these twin foundation elements, a preliminary project was devised that was awarded first prize in the public competition held in June 2001. The project is for a cultural centre covering 30,482 sq m, organised around a museum designed to house the various collections of applied arts (decorative arts, ceramics, graphic arts and graphic design, costume and fashion, architecture, industrial design, digital design and multimedia) that depend on the City Council and are now dispersed around Barcelona in insufficient provisional museums or inappropriately stored away from public access. This new complex is intended to generate a series of research and communication activities. The new institution will be called Barcelona Design Museum, although the name expresses only a part of its content.
The building will stand on the southeastern side of Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, where the square meets Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, the Diagonal and the Meridiana. According to the Plan for the New Town by Ildefons Cerdà (1855), this was supposed to be the centre of the new Barcelona. Until now the area has been much neglected as regards structure and city life. It has never achieved the status of centrality, being crisscrossed by a hotchpotch of communications networks: an overhead motorway that describes an elliptical ring, car parks, traffic arteries on all sides, both metro and main-line railway below ground level, and in the near future a tram line on the surface. Now the City Council proposes to give the square the urban value it deserves with two simultaneous projects: the idea is to correct the communications routes in such a way as to give the whole a more urban interpretation, and to promote the construction of certain flagship buildings in the area. The first stage of this new building scheme includes a cinema complex (by the architect Zaha Hadid) to complement the existing Plaça de les Arts (the National Theatre and the Auditorium), the Agbar high-rise office block (by the architect Jean Nouvel) and the block of municipal offices (by the architect Federico Soriano). Into this setting comes the new Design Museum.
The urban planning conditions in which the Museum is involved are as follows:
1) Construction of a new perimetral thoroughfare around the square, with a circumference of 368 m, at heights ranging from 11.01 m to 16.42 m. This street will enable a large part of the traffic to flow at a level approximately equal to that of the surrounding urban fabric; this continuity with the city's streets will replace the current motorway arrangement.
2) Demolition of the buildings underneath the present overhead ring, which in this way becomes a simple viaduct, leaving the whole esplanade free as a great metropolitan centre park, an urban breathing space with activities and interrelations.
3) Use of the gap between the level of the new street and that of the surrounding streets on the southeastern side, which at this point, exceptionally, stands at about seven metres. This gap will accommodate the largest of the Museum's exhibition halls, together with the facilities for monitoring, storing and treating the collections, which will thus neither occupy nor interrupt the continuity of the public space.
4) Creation of a lake at the bottom of this slope, providing at the same time a focal point for citizens and a light-reflecting surface for the vestibules and the semi-basement rooms in the Museums.
5) Construction of a longitudinal building parallel to the axis formed by Carrer d'Àvila. The ground floor will occupy a small surface area, but the building will project over the traffic ring. Carrer d'Àvila forms a direct link between Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes and Plaça de Tirant lo Blanc in the Olympic Village, primarily as a pedestrian thoroughfare, as a sort of dynamising backbone for the area. The new building has the same width as the street (20 m) and therefore shuts off its perspective. The projection over the ring, as well as being a consequence of the desire to occupy as little public space as possible on the ground floor, is also an attempt to change the image of the overhead motorway and assimilate it visually into some sort of urban normality. In addition, the building is an arrow pointing towards the centre of the square - or a hammer forcing in a wedge - and underscores the geography, i.e., makes it more readable and therefore more urban.
6) Establishment of a clear link between the various neighbourhoods surrounding the area: the Eixample, the northwestern districts, Plaça de les Arts, the new 22@ neighbourhood (a result of the transformation of the activities of El Poblenou) and the general structure of the park that the square will have become, taking into account the extremely useful interferences of the metro, the train and the tram.
7) Care, compositionally speaking, when dealing with the extreme proximity of the Agbar Tower and the office building, which will be either at the design or the construction stage, bearing in mind that these buildings will solemnly mark the entrance to the city, the first gesture of urban integration.
As regards the organisational criteria and the museological programme devised by Jordi Pardo, the following points should be stressed:
1) The various different collections have been analysed and classified to arrive at an overview and establish appropriate relations between them. The project at present encompasses more than half a million pieces, and there are expected to be many more due to the incorporation of further scattered collections.
2) The display and storage of these pieces will be regulated with several goals in mind:
a) Permanent and temporary exhibitions interpreting the unity of the material and its social and economic system of production, or providing transverse viewpoints following thematic criteria.
b) Short-duration exhibitions dealing with one-off topical phenomena and presenting research results. Although they will have their own architectural expression, the exhibition rooms will be extremely flexible, thus allowing a range of museographic solutions. It is museography that has to provide the definitive expression. The semi-basement will house the two main halls plus an introductory one. The upper floors of the linear building will have two more rooms for more mobile exhibitions.
c) Open-air exhibitions in an uncovered garden.
d) Study galleries alongside the technical offices, housing a large number of pieces that cannot be on view but will be duly classified and available for those wishing to study them: a way of getting greater use out of material that is usually stored away, far from the eyes of the public.
e) Depositories and storage rooms for less usable items, near the conservation and classification facilities.
3) Parallel research and dissemination activities will be carried out in a separate wing for the Master's courses, the library, the teaching rooms and the top-floor lecture hall, which will seat 450.
4) The general services will consist of two blocks of offices, one two-storey block for management and administration in the longitudinal building and the other for the technical specialists, alongside the study galleries. There will be a cafeteria with garden and shops on the ground floor, and a roof-top restaurant with panoramic views over the city.
Taking the above starting points, the architectural composition is defined with the following criteria:
1) The main access is on the Eixample side (Carrer d'Àvila), across a bridge over the lake, prolonged to form a pedestrian walkway that passes under the newly laid out circular street that extends to the centre of the park, where it meets several public transport stations. Access is by car or bus from the circular street.
2) The longitudinal building is a compact steel-clad body interrupted only by the glass walls, which correspond to specific points of the internal configuration and the auxiliary stairs and lifts leading to the top floor when the museum is closed. Both the form and the material enter into dialogue, by contraposition, with the huge coloured glass column of the Agbar Tower.
3) The areas in the semi-basement will be totally covered by the vegetation of the park, with the exception of two points providing the main exhibition halls with daylight from above.
4) The whole programme is bonded together by a building that connected the semi-basement to the upper floors and focuses all the circulation routes in a great vertical courtyard, 45 metres in height, containing the system of lifts and escalators that provide access to the successive vestibules. The courtyard is the hub of various activities and the unitary representation of the whole, a space that will serve to encourage informal events and even non-scheduled activities.
5) The whole interior takes on the appearance of a huge workshop. Luxury materials are avoided: we find walls of concrete blocks, lightweight movable partitions, concrete flooring, semi-visible installations in a metal false ceiling, etc. The luxury has to come from the content - the objects displayed and the cultural activities - and also from the presence of the visitors, who have to be able to move around the Museum in an atmosphere of work and ongoing experience.
We want to make this new institution into the city of design and everything related to it. A totally uncorseted, open, flexible and popular institution. But we also want it to contribute towards making the whole area into a living city. A new urban centre.

Page 49
A living space and a knowledge factory
by Jordi Pardo
Director of the project for Barcelona Design Museum
Barcelona Culture Institute

Barcelona has the conditions and the privileged position to establish itself as one of the world's design capitals and link up with the network of the main cities that turn out new trends and proposals. Its potential doesn't rest only on the strength of the one-off opportunity; it's the result of a historic process marked by the continuity of an age-old tradition that has created a significant density in the intellectual, academic, professional, industrial and commercial fabric, and this bears a relation to design culture.
As regards innovation in the process of the conceptualisation and materialisation of artificiality, Barcelona has been a point of creative and industrial refraction and reflection that holds sway beyond the borders of Catalonia, and has had an important part to play in the whole of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe generally. This privileged position, integrated within the dialogue between the great movements and trends of the 20th century, now faces the challenge of connecting with the network of international design centres.
Barcelona stands out for the complementary confluence of a variety of elements that create the optimal conditions for the growth of a systemic relationship between creativity, research, technological innovation, training and professional qualification, production capacity and commercialisation. These conditions have been developing since well before the Industrial Revolution, and they have defined a relationship of continuity that constitutes one of the city's most important differential assets over other cities and regions of Europe. Although it's true that industrial heavyweights like Milan in object design, Paris in the fashion world and Scandinavia in the field of architecture and digital design are examples of indisputable specialisation, Barcelona and Catalonia as a whole have a great opportunity to become an international point of reference for reflection, experimentation and interaction for all the disciplines that come under the umbrella of design. Architecture, industrial or object design, graphic design and visual communication, multimedia design and fashion are parts of a whole that's present both in the city's heartbeat today and in its creative tradition. It's precisely the sum of the strength of these specific areas that makes Barcelona unique... It's a broad, dense design territory in which the school, the office, the workshop, the factory, the laboratory and the shopwindow together form the great asset of innovation, as expressed in tradition, recent history and especially in the huge potential of our young designers.
The great tradition of manufacturing, the economic clout of the Catalan capital and its openness to the exchange of ideas, technologies and goods have made Barcelona the nerve centre of an integrated system. It's the same complex reality that the International Year of Design expresses in terms of both living reality and future prospects, wishes and a necessary utopia.
The tradition and historical continuity of trades related to the arts of the object, the force of the industrialisation of Catalonia, the vigour of its commercial activity, the importance and prestige of its architecture and design schools and the international renown of its professionals have all been decisive factors in the consolidation of a business that provides work for 30,000 people(1) and accounts directly for over 3% of the gross domestic product of the Catalan economy(2)
The fact that the Economic Board of Barcelona created the Escuela Gratuita de Diseño in 1775, the existence of schools of centennial prestige such as the Llotja and Massana Schools, the recognition earned by the Barcelona School of Architecture, the strength of fashion in Barcelona, and the celebration of the first centenary of Foment de les Arts Decoratives, give some idea of the length of the tradition and the scope of this phenomenon. The dynamism of the city's culture and art scene and the amplifying effect of its recent urban planning transformation are essential factors in understanding both the arrival in Barcelona of major foreign institutions and European design centres and also the fact that Barcelona is increasingly perceived as a place where design forms part of its external image and its tangible reality.

The museological project
The analysis of the environment, the tensions and challenges of design culture and the design industry and the results of a diagnosis of existing museum collections, and also new material crying out to be incorporated, stake out the basic parameters of the concept of the museum infrastructure. The same idea of the historical continuity of Barcelona's creative tradition as an element to be borne in mind, along with the need to imagine a museum that's more than just a static container for its collections, come together to express the need for an advanced museological concept. Barcelona Design Museum is intended as a knowledge factory. In other words, a living space that poses questions, that brings us into contact with new answers, where everything's possible: experimentation, research, the presentation of new proposals and concepts for the future, the contemporary gaze at the past, and the exploration of new interpretations of reality. For this reason, Barcelona Design Museum will be a museum infrastructure in which the language of the exhibition will mingle with the programming of non-exhibition activities, actions and experiments around three main concepts: culture, technology and creativity.
The museological proposal that is currently under construction(3) takes into account the requirements of the collections and the different disciplines of design, and also the keys marked by international trends and processes both in the field of design and in that of museum and culture management. Two basic criteria were employed in devising the proposed museological discourse: to develop a transverse and multidisciplinary reading, and at the same time to maintain the uniqueness of the collections and their associated disciplines.
The museological discourse is centred on the twinning of the concepts of creativity and utility that is inherent in design as an area of the production of artificiality and as a creative process. It will present its historical roots, deal with its impact on contemporary daily life, pose new challenges and analyse new tendencies from a general and multidisciplinary perspective. It will reflect on the artistic and expressive, symbolic, technological and functional, and economic facets of design with a vision that aims to enrich the anthropological dimension with which the complexity of the world of artificiality must necessarily be viewed.
Geographically, the discourse will take in the local dimension in the shape of the role played by Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain and the setting provided by the Mediterranean Arc; the tradition of European design; and the dialogue with the main trends on the international design scene.
The criterion of the uniqueness of the collections will make it possible to show an ordered presentation of the various areas of the collections and the relationship between the specific disciplines, without impairing the transverse readings we need in order to develop a general museological discourse that is open to the exploration of new topics of interest for the public and designers alike.
The initial municipal material we have to work with consists of an interesting decorative arts collection; the best collection of decorated and ornamental ceramics in Spain; a fine graphic arts collection; a very extensive collection of fabrics, particularly costume and accessories; and the best collection of industrial design in Spain. In total, more than 100,000 pieces. The perspective of the new project will enable these collections to grow and will make it possible to order them. Future collections will incorporate new material in architecture, graphic design and visual communication, and new acquisitions related to digital design and multimedia.
The specific thematic areas in which the collections will be organised are: decorative arts, ceramics, visual design and communication, architecture and urban design, industrial design, fashion and accessories, and digital design and multimedia, with a reference to advertising as a product of communication.

The articulation of the Museum
Barcelona Design Museum should be more than just a container for its collections; it's intended as a living space that is capable of acting as a driving force for culture. It's an infrastructure that's conceived as an integral part of a system at the service of experimentation, research, dissemination and awareness-raising towards design culture: a museum infrastructure acting as a knowledge factory and a modern instrument for the conservation of existing collections and the preservation of new acquisitions.
The Museum will be articulated in such a way as to take into account both the balanced functioning of the display resources and the capacity to organise proposals and activities with the most varied formats.
The display side is based around two simultaneous types of exhibitions: transverse and thematic exhibitions. In addition to these two generic lines of exhibition programming there will also be a type of exhibition space based on three differentiated models: permanent exhibitions, temporary exhibitions and study galleries (or visitable storage space). The Design Museum will also have an outside garden for showing the collections of street furniture and large three-dimensional elements, and for organising activities in a variety of different formats.
The permanent exhibitions will be conceived as changing spaces for communication. The temporary exhibitions will allow constant renovation of the proposals relating to the centre's research lines, with current news and joint productions with other institutions, groups and professionals. The study galleries or visitable storerooms will enable those members of the public who are interested in doing so to visit the Museum's collections, either as part of a special visit or in order to study the collections in depth.

The background to the Design Museum
The idea of creating a space for integrating the arts of the object and striking up a relationship between the schools, the professionals, the public and the industry dates back to the Barcelona of the 1930s. The political ideology of the Noucentista administrations identified culture as one of the pillars of the country's progress. Joaquim Folch i Torres imagined a museum devoted to summarising, presenting and preserving the heritage of the arts of the object. In 1932 the Museums Board set up the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Palau Reial in Pedralbes. This new space that was won for culture was intended as a showcase for the tradition of the arts of the object and a place of study for the artists and designers of the time, taking in different disciplines: objects of daily use, artistic objects and ornamental ones. In 1949 the Franco government decided to dismantle the Museum. Its collections were split up and moved to a whole series of buildings scattered over the city that were unsuitable for housing museum material and unfit for the growth of the collections and the appropriate management of internal and external services.
With the reinstatement of democratic institutions, many voices were raised in favour of setting up an infrastructure devoted to design. In the early 1990s, none other than Oriol Bohigas(4) formulated and defended a specific proposal aimed at retrieving a single museum that could once again exhibit the extensive municipal collections and enlarge them with new contemporary material.
The Museum of Decorative Arts was reopened to the public in 1995, in the same Pedralbes Palace as before. It exhibited the historical collections plus a new section representing industrial design, organised by Quim Larrea and Juli Capella, which is still today the most important of its kind in Spain. In 1999 the Strategic Plan for Culture,(5) promoted by Ferran Mascarell, again raised the need to create a museum dedicated to design as one of the most pressing of the new cultural infrastructures.
In the summer of 2001, MBM Arquitectes (a team of architects consisting of Oriol Bohigas, J. Martorell, D. Mackay, O. Capdevila and F. Gual) won the public competition called by Barcelona City Council. This marked the beginning of the process of defining the project in the framework of a conceptual and technical dialogue between architecture and museology that has been extremely fruitful. The basic architectural project devised by MBM was developed on the basis of the museological project, which required flexible and efficient management of the needs of the Museum's external and internal activities. Barcelona Design Museum is a strategic positioning related to three main objectives: firstly the creation of a new urban hub at Plaça de les Glòries, secondly the furthering of innovation in the field of the economic promotion of the city and the professional and industrial activity of design, and thirdly a cultural project for the future that fills an important gap in the city's museum map and constitutes a springboard for creativity and innovation.

Page 53
Catalan design on the Internet
by Vasava Artworks

Programs for viewing hypertext in combination with graphics were not to appear until the distribution of Mosaic at Christmas 1993. Netscape Navigator arrived in 1994 and Microsoft Explorer in 1995. It seems safe to say that the net has only been widely used for six or seven years.
The multiplying factor of a technology is the multiplier of the achieved effect over the expected result. Thus the technology of the car has a multiplying factor of 15, as it allows us to advance from a speed of 6 km/h when walking to one of 90 km/h when we use a car. The aviation industry enables us to reach a factor of 150. The calculating capacity of computers has a multiplying factor of 1,000,000 (the time it takes a computer to perform a multiplication, for example, is in the order of millionths of a second), as do electronic communications (a message can go round the world in a matter of seconds). The combination of computers and telecommunications (the case of the Internet) therefore has a multiplying factor of one billion [BARCELO, M. (2000). 10 impactes del segle XX: La revolució de les infotecnologies. Eumo: Vic].
Taking stock of the situation as it now stands is rather like asking Watt about the scope of the steam engine the day after he invented it; we're witnessing the first stammerings of a technology that will have an influence on every human activity and which is being constantly reinterpreted: the appearance of pages with hypertext, images, combination with programming, the use of sound, moving graphics, integration with other technologies, streaming, P2P applications, and so on.
Furthermore, to talk of the Internet in terms of location is absurd, because of the topological configuration of the network. Producers and consumers are mixed together in constellations that don't take geography into consideration. The contributions know no nationalities and the barriers to entry are minimal.
Bearing in mind these factors (an emerging technology of fabulous potential and the virtual impossibility of location), any attempt to make a thorough evaluation of Catalan design on the Internet is doomed to fail; all we can do, then, is give a few pointers.

How to approach design
Some have interpreted the appearance of the Internet as the creation of a new communication channel, extending the message to a new medium, inheriting traditional forms of language.
Others, more speculatively, have understood it as a new form of human communication, creating a new visual grammar.
A few have regarded it as a form of artistic expression, the point where art and informatics meet.
Whatever their views, they're all conscious of the fact that we're in the prehistory of the Internet, and that new revolutions will force us to rethink the use of this tool, as the appearance of Flash has already done.

A few links on the Catalan scene
Antoni Abad
Multimedia artist. He has exhibited in New York, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and elsewhere. His work Z earned him the Ciutat de Barcelona Prize 2002.
http://www.zexe.net
Area3
Founded in Barcelona in 1999, Area3 is a hypermedia laboratory formed by artists, designers, programmers and musicians. One of their most notable works is World Wall Painters, presented in Art Futura 2002.
http://www.area3.net
Can Antaviana
Firm specialising in the development of web projects. Started up in 1996, among their clients figure La Vanguardia newspaper, the Forum of Cultures 2004, Servijob and others. They are also in charge of the Astramat experimentation laboratory.
http://www.antaviana.com
Double You
Agency based in Barcelona and Madrid. They designed the websites "San Miguel City" and "Evax", implementing systems allowing interactivity with other visitors.
http://www.doubleyou.com
Herraiz Soto
Interactive advertising agency. Their best introduction is the awards given to them in Cannes and San Sebastián and the Laus awards, among others. Their website includes interactive entertainment.
http://www.herraizsoto.com
Innothna Artcomm
Studio for design, multimedia art and the development of new technologies. They show special sensitivity in the research of graphic interfaces. Their Innsonik project won the Playstation-Art Futura award for the development of new games.
http://www.innot.org
Jodi
Jodi is a joint project by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, two Belgian artists living in Barcelona. They use hacker language as a vehicle for artistic expression and social vindication.
http://sod.jodi.org
La Creativa
La Creativa is a multifunctional design team involved in graphic design, website creation, industrial design, interior design, architecture, computer application design, multimedia and advertising. They run KRTV, a space for free creation.
www.lacreativa.com
La Mosca
A design studio in the finest sense of the word. Of all their activities, the most outstanding are their projects in the area of corporate identity, editorial design and graphic communication. Their "Estadístiques Societat de la Informació 2001" (Information Society Statistics 2001) was singled out as Macromedia Site of the Week.
http://www.lamosca.com
Netthinkcarat
Interactive agency started up in 1998 and belonging to the Carat group. Their clients include such big names as BMW, Philips, Disney, Telefónica and Renault, among others.
http://www.netthinkcarat.com
Vasava Artworks
Interdisciplinary studio which embraces creative projects using a variety of media: Internet, print, events and so on. They strike a balance between commercial jobs and their own projects, which have brought them renown internationally and in the leading media (IdN, Shift, Zoo, etc.).
http://www.vasava.es
Xnografics
Design studio set up in 2001. Their attitude and mastery of the medium have enabled them to make their mark on the scene in very little time. Their project www.porno-grafics.com has earned itself an international following for its bold approach.
http://www.xnografics.com

Page 56
Teaching design: the state of the art and future challenges
by Oriol Pibernat Director of the Eina School,
Octavi Rofes Deputy director of the Eina School

It's commonly perceived within the design sector itself that the Catalan design scene is fraught with difficulties and defies understanding. Three factors are responsible for these supposed difficulties:
-The rather large number of schools teaching design;
-The existence of different qualifications, types of studies and academic registration;
-The indecipherableness of the educational differences between the range of schools and qualifications available, which is derived partly from the combined effect of the other two factors and partly from ignorance of the origins, development and present perspectives that are at stake in this type of education.
This perception that the situation is difficult to grasp has been wielded by both the Spanish and the Catalan governments as an argument to refrain from exercising their role as regulators - the attitude they have maintained for the past 20 years - and then to intervene hastily without taking the schools into account or recognising them as interlocutors. Precisely for this reason, in order to make a diagnosis, to take stock of the present situation and the prospects for the future of design teaching in Catalonia, we need to start by making the current scene more intelligible and by wrestling with prejudices and intuitions with the aid of clear explanations. And so we'll see that the complexity isn't so overwhelming after all, and the difficulties of understanding are far from justified.

Barcelona: capital of design teaching
At present there are a large number of schools in the Barcelona area that teach design at various levels, covering all the traditional specialities or pathways: graphic design, industrial design, interior design and textile and costume design. The publicly owned schools fall into two groups that have gone their different ways: the municipal schools, which belong to the network of the provincial councils, and those that belong to the Catalan government's network of schools of arts and crafts. Prominent in the first group are the Massana School, with a long tradition of design studies, and the Illa Municipal School of Art in Sabadell, while the second group is headed by the Llotja School of Plastic Arts and Design. They have all been through some critical periods due to the reorganisation of further education imposed by the LOGSE (the law on education passed in 1990). However, the reaction and adaptation of the network of municipal schools has clearly been faster, and it is they who lead the non-university education available today as regards design.
We can't talk about design teaching in Catalonia without also talking about the private schools. These often grew out of initiatives taken by teachers, intellectuals and professionals. The oldest are the Elisava and Eina Schools, which were set up in the sixties, and together with the Massana they are responsible for the introduction of design as an educational option. Other private schools - Esdi, Bau and Lai - were founded later. All these schools have sought out a university framework for their courses, although there are also private schools such as IDEP and IED whose courses aren't regulated by the university system. The picture is completed by those degrees and studies offered directly by the universities.
At first glance this list might suggest that there is an excessive number of schools. However, it's important to bear in mind, as we'll see in a moment, that not all the schools teach the same sort of courses, and the demand for places and the way they are adjudicated maintain this diversity of options. We could almost say, to stand the prejudice of the glut of schools on its head, that the most innovative and peculiar element of Barcelona's design culture is precisely the plurality of initiatives in the world of design teaching and the academic options that the schools have undertaken.
Qualifications and the question of university studies
It could be regarded as an abusive generalisation to talk of design studies, as a training in design can be achieved at different academic levels, in various degrees of specialisation and with a view to heterogeneous professional profiles. In principle, the qualifications that are given at present respond to this variety, and fall into three main categories:
The middle and higher Cicles Formatius or "Training Cycles" are pre-university studies that provide a training for mid-level designers in specialised fields of design. These qualifications are taught, together with the Batxillerat Artístic or Arts Baccalaureate and courses that don't lead to university studies, in some of the schools in the public networks mentioned earlier.
Within the university field there are two types of design studies. First there is the Diploma in Industrial Design, which in Catalonia is taught at the University of Girona, the Elisava School and the Technical University of Catalonia. It is a three-year homologated university diploma the aim of which is to produce technologically skilled industrial designers capable of meeting the design needs of the technical offices of industrial or engineering firms. Then there are those faculties that, owing to the nature of their studies, include departments or subjects that have a direct relationship with design teaching: Fine Art and Audiovisual Communication. These faculties don't actually award design qualifications, nor do they have a specific syllabus for design, but they provide education in this field as part of a broader study context.
Lastly, and still in the university context, there is the Degree in Design. This is a non-homologated university qualification, i.e., the course is run by each university, following the pattern of a four-year degree, with similar syllabuses drafted independently by each university that teaches it, but without the official blessing of the Spanish government. This is the formula that was adopted as of the 1990s by the existing schools to advance in the academic development of design. The ESDi offer their degree through Ramon Llull University, the Eina do so through the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the Elisava through Pompeu Fabra University, the Bau through the University of Vic, and the Lai through the International University of Catalonia. The School of Architecture at the Technical University of Catalonia also teaches the second stage of the Degree in Design. Finally, the Massana School teaches the three-year Diploma in Art and Design awarded by the Autonomous University of Barcelona. All these qualifications are intended as a training for more or less all-round designers whose skills are applied to product design, graphic design and visual communication, and the design of spaces.
As you can see, the schools with a more consolidated educational status have opted to provide university degrees (at present six Catalan universities offer the non-homologated Degree in Design) and aspire to bring this process together definitively with one last step leading to the homologation of the degree. It's in this context that the Catalan government's Ministry of Education is promoting its Higher Design Studies. This qualification has a duration of three years and is regarded as "equivalent" to a diploma in the LOGSE system. It's expected to be introduced in the near future, although its extra-university nature means that it represents a step backwards on the road followed by Catalan design teaching, and furthermore it has been drawn up behind the backs of the schools and without heed to the reality of the situation.

The teaching of design and its different educational filiations
Independently of the public or private ownership of the schools and the nature of the qualifications they award, the main differences between schools have to do with their belonging to different educational traditions, their evolution and the direction in which they are heading today.
The oldest tradition is based around the idea of the applied arts, which gave rise to the schools of arts and crafts. In the 19th century, this idea served as a focal point for the conservationist desire to preserve or retrieve the know-how of the trades that were threatened by industrialisation, and also for the reformist desire to "apply" artistic properties in the shaping of new objects as a response to a certain aesthetic dishevelment very characteristic of that century. The traces of this legacy, obviously updated by a more modern approach to design, are still recognisable in some very notable schools which place a great deal of importance on practical work and workshop techniques in the designer's learning process. The designer is regarded as a highly skilled artisan who in the final stage takes on the role of a project designer; in other words, she surpasses the repetitive practices of her trade and enters the terrain of creation. This transition from applied art to a new type of synthesis between technical know-how and artistic ability is what the Bauhaus practised (really, the first stage of the Bauhaus), which explains why, for this sort of school, the experience that culminated in Weimar Germany is still a point of reference, 80 years on.
The other main filiation dates back to the ideas of the Hochschule für Gestaltung, better known as the Ulm School. Here we have a school that was actually set up as a design school for the specific purpose of training professionals. The educational approach of this tradition, unlike the previous one, tends to direct its studies away from art as a source of creation and the trade as a technical apprenticeship. This other seed of learning for design sprouted in the middle of the revolution of science and technology, in the 1950s, at a time when scientific knowledge was being structured organically with industry and scientists were being employed by companies. This made it advisable to try out a model for design training that would bring together scientific knowledge and technological development put at the service of industry. Although the methodological and technocratic excesses were abandoned as soon as it became clear that they made for inefficiency, this tradition can be seen to be relevant today, as the studies are intended as a more direct response to the needs of industry and the demands of the market. Undeniably, technological skills have become a key element in design teaching. There is a trend, Anglo-Saxon rather than Germanic in origin, towards budget cuts in this type of teaching, and in this sense it could be said to be on the decline. However, in this case the rationale applied to the project has more to do with market aspects than with technological ones. The response isn't to industrial needs but to the needs of consumption, in other words, arguments of commercial viability take precedence over those of industrial viability when judging the goodness of a design. Whatever the angle, in this teaching tradition professional practice and adaptation to economic demands become the focal point of the learning experience.
A third filiation arose out of the New Bauhaus Institute of Design founded by Molholy-Nagy in Chicago (1937-1955). The distinctive feature of the New Bauhaus was the emphasis it placed on visual intelligence in the design process as a region in which art and science can converge. In this, theories of perception and cognitive interaction with images and objects were particularly important. But perhaps the greatest contribution of this approach was that it ushered in the recognition of a more complex framework of action for design and called for a more critical attitude to the reductionism of the functionalist and professionalist perspectives. For those who subscribe to this filiation, design isn't a profession but an attitude. Perhaps the effect of these ideas was so far-reaching because they represented a reaction to the Ulm HfG; they triggered a search for new alternatives based more on aesthetic experience than on deductive logic and stressed the relationship between perception and action, moreover arguing that any technological act is inevitably also a moral act. This tradition can be traced today in those schools that emphasise the interaction of art, science and technology. They do this by vindicating the speculative and experiential contributions of art and incorporating them into their design courses (while other schools leave them out), giving a high profile to the social sciences in the analysis of the context and the complex factors involved in the whole design process (as opposed to a merely instrumental use), and understanding technology as a non-neutral means for transforming reality (i.e., not evading the ethical aspect of the role of the designer).

A sector in flux: three proposals for the future
Our descriptive analysis of the present situation in design teaching reveals, rather than confusion and lack of articulation, the existence of well-consolidated foundations on which to build a system providing a large part of the requirements of the different levels of design teaching. However, whether full advantage is taken of the potential of these foundations depends to a large extent on the articulation with the rest of the agents in the development of the sector. The three proposals below stand as an invitation to rethink the role education should play in the transformation of design in Catalonia.
1. From the training of designers to educating in design
In an attempt to focus the reflection on the social importance of design teaching, Gunnar Swanson(1) has posed two paradoxical situations that serve to delimit its scope. Firstly, it's indicative that, whereas the effectiveness of a philosophy teacher is no measure of the number of professional philosophers that have come out of her classes, design teachers are evaluated solely as trainers of designers, and any former student who doesn't end up in a professional practice as such is considered a failure. Secondly, Swanson points out that although there's a more or less general consensus on the need to include, for example, an introduction to anthropology in the curriculum of the design student, there is no mention of the reciprocal need to include an introduction to design in the studies of an anthropology student. Rather than education, we're talking about a specialised apprenticeship during which tools are acquired that have no other function than to provide the student with a professional skill. If, on the other hand, we broaden our viewpoint and start talking about a "world of design" that embraces research, criticism, management, curatorship and education, the objectives of design studies clearly have to be broader and more complex, and go beyond the strict training of designers. Similarly, if the community of designers defines itself from this wider "world of design", its members will take on a more sophisticated sense of its history, practice and social function. Therefore, if we expect design teaching to be more than just the training of suppliers of technical services, if the design schools are given the responsibility of generating discourse and promoting research, a field is opened up that is richer and more ambitious than that which designers themselves define as theirs at present, a field that would attract practitioners of other disciplines, who would see the synthetic nature of design as an opportunity to integrate and enrich their knowledge and skills.
The push that the schools need in order to be able to advance from training designers to educating in design, which involves moving from the edge of the "professional sector" to the centre of the "world of design", requires that they integrate fully into the university system. Only in this way can they escape from the situation in which the professional sector, which legitimates its authority by presenting itself as the "Real World", is the demand and the schools the supply, on the basis of preconceived definitions of professional practice. What's expected nowadays of design schools? Actually, nothing very much. The institutions grant them a testimonial or at best secondary role in the definition of such crucial initiatives as Design Year and the Design Museum, the businesses link them to their commercial departments by organising trivial competitions instead of considering ways of cooperating in research, and the designers often see them as little more than employment agencies that meet the needs of the professional studio. This self-styled "Real World" only expects the schools to provide the reproduction, the structure and the routine habits of the sector - but of course, in the form of young designers that are fully equipped to face the latest technological revolution.
2.- From the market survey to academic research
If we consider design purely from the viewpoint of professional practice, the concept of research is reduced to the various techniques that designers uses to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of their clients' briefs. Such a restricted use of the possibilities of research has brought about a situation in which, as Victor Margolin has pointed out(2), although almost the entirety of our material and visual culture is produced by designers, the role of design in contemporary society is still largely unknown, and the multiple possibilities of design are still far from being properly explored. Even though design doesn't actually need research to exist, practice alone is unlikely to produce the sort of reflection that could lead to a thorough evaluation of what's being designed today and an in-depth debate on what should be designed in the future.
The scope of research in design should go further than market surveys and include:
- The development of experimental projects, perhaps without any client or brief, but on the basis of real needs and a real "audience"
- Research in theory allowing, through historical and social research and analytical practice, the definition and revision of conceptual frameworks and criticism of the value judgements implicit in design culture
- Close-ups of particular contexts, in which case studies provide better knowledge of the effectiveness of design and enable us to exert a direct influence on the actions, attitudes and values of individuals and communities, and at the same time explore the possibilities of design to act as a connector for issues related to communication, interaction, expression and cognition
The full integration of design into the university system - and that means homologating the non-homologated Diploma and Degree in Design and promoting postgraduate studies - is the only way of creating a community that is oriented towards research. Moreover, it's the only way to have mechanisms of evaluation guaranteeing the achievement of academic standards and generating an atmosphere of collaboration, far removed from the logical competitiveness of the professionals' day-to-day work, and means to disseminate the results of the research being done.
3.- From adequacy to adaptability
It's now a commonplace to say that a large number of the professions that will make up the world of employment 15 years from now don't exist yet. In the case of design this forecast would appear to be quite convincing: everything seems to indicate that 15 years from now designers will still exist, and that they'll be even more numerous and necessary - but it's also easy to foresee that the sector's social function, professional methods and organisation will be very different from what they are today. Alain Findeli(3) has drawn up four points characterising the evolution of design over the coming years:
1.- The defetishisation of the product of design: the practice of design will cease to be viewed as an act of heroism, the designer will be expected to tackle more complex systems than simple "problem-solving" with a demiurgic gesture.
2.- The growing complexity of the brief: it will cease to be a conventional description of the product and will focus on its repercussions on particular social and cultural contexts.
3.- The shift from an industrial imagery to a tertiarised imagery: methods historically oriented towards the production of material goods will have to be adapted to new needs that require the rendering of often immaterial services, and to the organisation of new lifestyles in fields such as leisure, health, education and communication.
4.- The need for sustainable design: environmental awareness will force designers to adopt new attitudes to the natural environment.
It's the responsibility of the schools to take a leading role in these processes of change. They can't limit themselves to attending to "what the market demands" unless they want to run the risk of turning out designers equipped with knowledge and skills that will soon become obsolete and who will have serious difficulties to adapt to any change in the sector.
It seems likely that in coming years the evolution of the "world of design" in Barcelona will be along the lines of setting up mechanisms to articulate the transformation of design processes with the generation of a mature and self-aware discourse that is capable of providing a greater understanding of these processes and a broad dissemination of their scope. Whether this challenge will be met successfully will depend on whether the schools assume a proactive as opposed to reactive role in the face of change, and whether this role is properly acknowledged. If they do so, they will have to be redefined and considered as central to the construction of a broad community in which a fruitful debate can be held on the production, distribution and consumption of the products of design and the role of designers in society. It's the schools who can be expected to come up with the initiatives that will enable design to fit into what's been called the "knowledge society". And this full integration of design teaching into the universities will make it possible to build bridges of fluid communication between the various areas of design, just as it will enable design to interact with the other disciplines involved in the study and development of visual and material culture. And finally, the universities also provide the opportunity to maintain on-going advantageous exchange with the other communities that do research and renew design practices throughout the world.



Page 64
Against "designerdom": in defence of a more cross-bred design
by Josep Bohigas Architect

Recently, on the late-night current affairs programme La nit al dia on Catalan TV's Canal 33, Juli Capella voiced the need to take the opportunity offered by the centenary of the FAD and the fact that 2003 is Design Year to celebrate and air the debate on the discipline. The aim, he said, "is to bring design down to the people", to make it more understandable and, in short, more useful. Mònica Terribas, the programme's presenter, with her usual mixture of innocence and pithiness, asked "bring design down?... Where from? Where was it?"
It's true, it's difficult to understand how a discipline like this could have distanced itself from the people, when it's the people who actually define its need. A useless object, one that's not born of the need to solve a particular problem, or that doesn't propose an improvement, wouldn't appear to have a place on the market nor, therefore, on the production line.
Or maybe it would, if we take it that design, or rather the designer objects that are to be "brought down", are no longer proposed as a solution or a commitment, and instead have come to decorate our surroundings exceptionally and successfully. Objects that have stepped back from the crudity of use to compete, encroaching on the world of art and luxury, with other decidedly less programmatic disciplines.
For many people, "designer objects" - the symptoms of "designeritis" - are spuriously modern, exceptional, expensive, unnecessary and useless, they don't seek to solve any programme or meet any need, and they occupy space that is alien to them (the mantelpiece, for instance).
The problem is that in Barcelona, where a considerable amount of good design is produced, "designer design", in this pejorative sense of objects that are mannered and useless, has stuck in the collective consciousness.
So much so that the meaning of the word has gradually shifted, and now "designerdom" designates a thing of sophisticated artificiality and perverseness. A designer ham or a designer flower is genetically deplorable, a designer garden or a designer landscape is unauthentic, and a designer politician or a designer drug is particularly false and abominable.
How did we get into this situation? First of all, we have to admit that the media was very well disposed towards designerdom, and in just a few years it succeeded in amplifying the city's link with the discipline. Barcelona is a capital of design and architecture thanks, in part, to the boom provided by the beginnings of designerdom.
This transformation can be traced back to the optimism of the eighties, when it was urgent to externalise the rapid modernisation of society. Design became a fundamental tool for exploring with intensity and enthusiasm all kinds of new and old circumstances. The thing we remember most about those times, when the standard ironic chat-up line was "D'you study or d'you design?", was the effort that went into wiping out the slimy past with refreshing gadgets that gave us a new catalogue of possibilities.
During those years, the magazines DeDiseño and, later on, Ardi (edited by Juli Capella and Quim Larrea) and the awards given by the associations FAD and BCD, among others, disseminated the new designs, creating a sort of Barcelona trademark that has proved very effective and unfortunately too long-lived.
Once the party of 1992 was over, the initial optimism turned into the cloying elitist rhetoric that, as Juli Capella was saying, now needs to be brought down a notch.
But the idea of coming down has always been unsatisfactory, as it's taken to mean that an effort is being made by an elite to communicate with an uninformed populace. At this late stage it would be naive to propose an ethics of design to orient such a complex and - thankfully - diverse discipline. If we were still modern (in the historical sense of the word) we would conceive of design in exclusively moral terms which would give rise to reformist strategies. But the material we're forced to work with is a conglomerate of natural, artificial and immaterial elements in a more cross-bred society, in which we have to try out a new approach.
The new generations of designers and architects have been saying so for some time. They were the first to distance themselves from disciplinary strategies and embrace a new disreputable realism that meets new needs. It's now time for institutions (such as the FAD) to open their doors to these more cross-bred, reality-smeared manifestations that propose a work schedule that is none other than that of redefining, through design, contemporary man's place in relation to the world.
Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros have described in detail this hybrid condition of architecture and design that can reconcile their objectives with those of society. They propose greater sensitivity to the policies of nature, shifting high-tech experiments (a hangover from the modern spirit) towards more hybrid models. "A hybrid materiality that implies a profound transformation of aesthetic ideals, in tune with the mishmash of our human landscapes.(1) A new naturalness capable of reconciling ecology and the economy in this hyperconnected world, offering itself as a poetic substrate from which to deploy new optimistic answers.
In this way, reconciliation with society means developing strategies for a new cross-bred realism that breathes emotion into its transforming aesthetic through possibilism and utopia, undistilled (without style), wholesale.
And where better than the FAD to give it a try? I recently heard Juli Capella recognising, with a bad conscience rather than pride, his responsibility in the designer boom of the eighties. Now things have changed, and I think he, from his position as an agitator and president of the FAD, is one of the few people capable of building a bridge between the generations in support of a new commitment to a more cross-bred design.

President Bush's military advisers have designed a plan to attack Iraq. Designer drugs increase the risk of developing dementia praecox and Parkinson's disease. The president of Futbol Club Barcelona has designed his retirement from the presidency. These and similar phrases have appeared in the newspapers recently. Barcelona has declared 2003 Design Year, and according to one of the slogans used to explain briefly and simply what design is all about, "designing is thinking things out before doing them." No doubt this is a good resort to start a conversation, as we've reached the point where we constantly have to ask ourselves the question: what do we mean when we talk about design? The term has reached such a general level of usage that it's fully assimilated and is commonly used in any activity to refer to a premeditated action. In an article entitled "Things tell us things", the writer Vicente Verdú talks of the original philosophy of design: "... when the design of an object succeeds in confusing its form and its function, the result is similar is to that produced in biology (...) the aim of design is not to make things look nice. True design is related to the design of things, their morphology and their purpose." (1).
The term "design" took off in Barcelona in the early eighties, when there was a boom in a series of disciplines dedicated to graphic communication, the configuration of objects, interior spaces and fashion. These were years of great creative activity, coinciding with the democratic change the country was experiencing, in an attempt to make up for some of the lost time. Now "design" is an absolutely naturalised word, both in technical and colloquial speech, even in disciplines such as architecture and engineering when talking about creative processes. Some would have it, corporately speaking, that this whole phenomenon of the popularisation of the term is negative, claiming that it blurs a series of activities and causes them to lose their identity, but far from this, we believe that it may have a beneficial effect, as it can help to open up a debate on the theoretical foundations and the projection of the different disciplines of design in the 21st century.
However, that is an altogether different thing from the consequences of the perversion, to a large extent caused by growth defects, of associating the term "design" with a whole series of negative qualities that are contrary to the spirit and purpose of this activity as it was defined in its recognised origin. Some highly eloquent examples are to be found in two very recent adverts with the surprising phrases "designed but practical", referring to a watch, and "designed but cheap", talking about a car. These expressive punch lines pander to the popular feeling that sees design as something strange, above all uncomfortable, illegible, expensive, elitist, confusing, extravagant and so on. We won't go into the reason for this link here, as it has already been profusely analysed by several specialists, but I'd like to take this opportunity to call for an effort - and Design Year might be a good time to do it - to try and clear up what could be described as an unfortunate misunderstanding.

"Collective design"
In the catalogue for the exhibition "Compound Future", the architect Josep Maria Montaner states, "The field in which design culture in Barcelona is concentrated most intensely may be that of street furniture (...) it is also because in Europe's Mediterranean cities the culture of public space is so essential that it becomes the terrain on which the greatest successes and failures of the native culture are played out." (2). Street furniture like signs, benches, transports and many others are what best show the differences between design for the people as a whole and the design of goods and resources for personal use. When we refer to collective design we don't only mean street furniture, but all those areas that perform a public function, such as transports, health facilities, schools, administrative facilities, etc., and to classify an element as such it's of no importance whether its ownership is public or private. This group includes everything that's used by a large number of different people who have no possibility of deciding what the element should be like; they simply find it installed. Design has a great deal of responsibility in solving collective problems, as the target audience is the public at large, and this is a very delicate variable in any project.
For years now the public administrations have been commissioning or selecting products and applications that are the result of a design process. It's true that this isn't the case with everything around us, and it's also true that the decisions are not always the right ones, and not everything that's installed is well designed, or it isn't well applied, or both of these at once. The transformation of the city, with the intention of designing the public space, began with the reestablishing of democratic town councils. One of the periods in which we remember this change as being most intense were the years leading up to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Whole neighbourhoods, streets, parks and squares were reurbanised or redesigned. And one of the consequences of this was that the urban space was populated with a new series of objects.
Immediately after this historic milestone, the bottom dropped out of a lot of things. One of the effects of this was critical reflection on everything that had been done, and in the case we're concerned with here, there were studies such as I nosaltres què? El que els usuaris pensen dels elements urbans (What about Us? What the Users Think about Urban Elements) (Universitat de Barcelona. Documents de Medi Ambient, No. 13), which published the results of surveys conducted among users and residents on elements such as benches, streetlights, rubbish bins, water fountains, parking spaces, playparks and so on. The results were varied but fairly critical, bringing into question the functionality or the aesthetics (or both) of many of the objects that had been installed, and which were particularly significant because they had been designed from scratch just when all the changes were happening to our cities. In this respect, it's worth recalling the controversy that surrounded the installation of public benches without backs, which were regarded by many as little short of an aberration. This goes to show that street furniture generates opinion, and reminds us that the citizens too are protagonists of this design, even if on occasions their opinions conceals a certain amount of reluctance to change in aesthetic yardsticks, many of which have a long tradition in towns and cities.
Nevertheless, we have to understand that at that time there was a change from a situation of doing almost nothing with regard to the renewal of facilities to one of thorough overhaul. What's more, all these changes were made in little time, with little past experience to go by, and with a limited range of suitable street furniture. Products appeared that contributed very interesting solutions, whereas others were gratuitous or simply bad, taking advantage of the success and popularity of certain acknowledged models. That period can be regarded as a huge laboratory that enabled us to draw some valuable conclusions. Now there's a wider range available, and many firms that operate in this sector have seen the usefulness of having a good design for their products.
It can't be claimed that there's too much design when new situations are arising in the urban context that require all sorts of elements to provide solutions for problems some of which are unprecedented, at least in this country. It is symptomatic that this year's reference topic for the final thesis at the Elisava School of Design is entitled: "The City: New Situations". These new situations are concerned with mobility, housing, immigration, the environment and sustainability, marginalisation, security, accessibility, health, new means of communication, and other issues. Towns and cities face new challenges for which they'll need new mechanisms for communication, systems, resources and objects that we have yet to consider, or have only done so anecdotally. Moreover, nothing we have can ever be said to be totally finished, and naturally everything is improbable.

"Private design"
We call "private design", as opposed to the "collective" design described above, everything intended for the context and activity of individuals in their private life, in which the decision to use it presumably lies with those individuals. This group includes the whole extensive range of products we use on a daily basis in the context of our home, our work and our leisure. The categories of elements include vehicles, household appliances, clothes, video and audio equipment, communication devices, sports equipment, publications, books, etc. In the preface to the catalogue of the recent exhibition of Spanish design "Passion", the designer Quim Larrea says: "At this juncture, the start of the 21st century, the functional needs of the West are all met." (3). This comment is very appropriate to support the thesis of the exhibition, namely that in the face of the abundance of all kinds of elements that we are offered by firms in developed countries, by means of production systems that were unimaginable 50 years ago, and assuming that all the functional challenges are easily met by current technology, one of the most valuable resources of design, in order to give added value to its intervention, is that of making the user feel "emotion". This approach, which is very interesting in the theoretical field of the communicational values of design, runs the risk of being as questionable as the famous thesis on "the end of history".
In our everyday context as consumers, where there's a huge choice in some things and a huge gap in others, we don't know, for example, what alternatives there will be to the car in the mid or long term. Many household appliances, veritable classics in our homes, will disappear as independent objects and form part of a new approach to building living space. We will see the incorporation of new audiovisual technologies for housing that will require devices or interfaces that will have to be designed. In this respect the digital world and information technology represent an abundant source of possible new and unprecedented products. Without going so far, even in the field of household furniture, the announcement by Barcelona City Council to the effect that they will build new housing for financially independent young people, couples without children and old people, smaller flats in some cases, seems likely to necessitate the proposal of new solutions to replace the traditional concept of interior space and therefore also how it's fitted out.
Although it isn't necessarily the place of design to invent consumer goods - the discipline we call "innovation" takes care of that - there are enough problems related to the creation and use of things that we need now to justify the intervention of designers. Think, for example, of the short life cycle of many of today's products, which can lead to certain utilitarian aspects being neglected, resulting in a loss of quality. How to combine this quality, which the user has a right to demand, with the production time and cost and the marketing of the products is a tricky equation which the marketing departments of companies are well aware of. Another factor that's causing concern in the industry today is not so much what their products should be like but what these new products should be. To put it more simply: What needs to be made? How to make it is no longer the question. It's also on this whole new battleground that the new foundations of design will have to be fought out, since it's increasingly necessary to formulate purposes and objectives; the theoretical corpus works from principles that were established last century, and although it might seem obvious to say so, things have changed a lot.

Conclusions
Too much design? Yes, if we only understand design as an aesthetic and unthinking intervention in the form of things, with the only aim of seeking differentiation and serving to attract. There are a vast number of variations on the same themes, and even in the best cases, they are nothing but pure, wearisome repetitions. There's something wrong when an object is called a designer object in order to justify it.
Too much design? No, if design continues to be the activity that consists in thinking out everything we use in order to make it of interest for our daily life, and at the same time affects issues that really concern us. Design should reflect, through its intervention, the changes that are taking place in society, whether they are social, cultural or technological.

Page 72
Synergies between design and enterprise
by Joan Vinyets i Rejón Anthropologist and designer
Founder member of the innovation consultancy Eggo

It is extremely difficult to establish a particular model or explanation of the relationship between design and enterprise, as it responds to highly diverse situations and environments. Design-enterprise relations depend on many variables: the production sector in which the design is to act, the degree of development of the technical-production and economic system in which it operates, the level of evolution and diversification of the market concerned, and so on.
Therefore, given the complexity of the brief and the constraints imposed by this short article, all I shall attempt to do here is to show some of the possibilities for the future and the limitations that arise in the relationship between creativity and production.
The first part of this article will seek to provide an overview of the role that design was originally required to fulfil, and which, perhaps because of the growing complexity of society itself, has gradually been lost or modified. In contrast, the second part will be an attempt to describe some of the trends that are emerging on the international scene, which seem to point towards the "new" synergies between design and enterprise.

The advent of industrialisation: a mechanical interaction
The shift from a craft society to an industrial one brought about a very important change in relations between design and enterprise: the separation of the creative stage from the production stage. Until that time, the experimentation and assimilation of materials, the search for the right form, for production capacity, were all carried out by the designer-cum-manufacturer. This made for the interaction of knowledge, which was then reflected in the product, where quality was implicit in the very nature of the materials and the know-how of the artisan, and therefore in the creative stage itself.
The advent of industrialisation, intense technological development, the introduction of new materials, the specialisation of science and technology and many other phenomena caused a rift to appear between creativity and manufacturing. Quality ceased to be implicit in the creative stage. We should understand this break as a first step towards the possibility and the fact of "quality" being something that has to be designed.
Moreover, the strength of the material, which historically had stood as a regulatory element of great importance (stabilising forms and imposing its own links for the time needed to assimilate and recognise its implicit utilitarian values), has gradually been eroded to the point we are at now: the constant introduction of new materials, exploration of the possibilities of technology, miniaturisation and the digital revolution have together brought about a lack of stable, lasting points of reference in the development of the design and in the perception of the product itself. A tacit lack of "quality" in the deepest sense.
This has spelt a new situation in which quality has become an indispensable element of design and the designer is required to endow production capacity with content and value, taking into account the cultural aspects that make up the specific nature of the user, matching creativity to production.

Mechanical interaction:
the bipolar enterprise+designer model
In the first relations that were established between designers and enterprise, in the framework of an incipient and homogenous market, designers were expected to do their job as allies of their clients (businesses) in order to create and offer new products to the consumer. Design was based primarily on the productive and marketing know-how of the business and the intuitive skills of the designer, a logical extension of the arrangement previously embodied by the figure of the artisan.
This was a very logical evolution in the framework of an incipient industrial development built on basic technologies and production systems. However, with today's saturated and diversified markets, characterised by products with a technological base and by complex design and development processes that require the creation of new products, this model is difficult to continue.
As the consumer society has evolved, the initial idea of a "market" conceived as a homogenous unit has gradually been replaced by a situation in which personal sensitivity and individual preferences have resurfaced. The shift from the idea of the great majority to that of the great minorities seems to have underscored a logical evolution linked to diversification and personalisation. At present, consumption is immersed in the specific dimension of behaviour and clearly oriented towards particular experiences of life that must be observed, analysed and interpreted in order to be transferred to the business world: new products and services. It is a new reality that alters the framework of action for the businesses and the designer.
Consumption today is inextricably involved in the specific dimension of subjects' "behaviour". It is locked in on certain contexts of life that are to be watched, studied and analysed so that products can then be created that fit into this behaviour. Which means that the subject has to return to the centre of the product design process.
Studying consumption solely through business eyes, in the form of marketing, analysing a product hypothesis in relation to a segment, without taking into consideration contexts of use and the general scenario in which users interact, is a simplistic and biased approach. To adopt it is to run the risk of producing a design that only answers to the company's viewpoint and imposing products that lack the "quality" that users require and demand. This is the new framework that brings us to the real relationship between enterprise and the designer.
The quality of any new product begins with design, which is why design - inasmuch as it is a maieutic tool - can be very useful for interpreting the experiences of the user with regard to the needs that a new product should meet.

Complex interaction:
the interactiv enterprise+designer+user model
In the new scenario characterised by an interactive model of relationships, the designer comes to act as an interlocutor between her clients: the company and the users of its objects, even though this reality is often narrowed to the perception that the company is the designer's only client. In this framework, the designer is required to have the capacity to interpret users' demands and translate them into new products.
Clearly, and importantly, the fact of describing a need is not enough. The designer has to be able to grasp how people interact and relate to things in order to endow the new product with real meaning. Knowing how people use and conceive their own surroundings, artefacts, spaces, and how they carry on their daily life, is an important input for the design world, and therefore also for enterprise, as this is the area in which its business opportunities are to be found.
From this viewpoint, we can say that the new strategic key to design lies in the relocation of the design project and its relations with enterprise, above and beyond the reality that the product itself represents. It is an aspect that is often underestimated and reduced to mere formal issues. The design stage ought to be seen as an "ethnographic" moment, as the narration of a particular experience that is built around a specific need. Thus, the product ceases to be seen as the end result of a particular preconceived idea in the production environment, arrived at by exploring technological possibilities, and becomes the materialisation of a potential experience that has been interpreted from day-to-day life - the terrain explored by designers - then to be translated into the design of a product, and the new area of synergies between enterprise and design.
Thinking out and designing a new product for the future is not just a problem of technological innovation, marketing seduction, communicative persuasion, or improving performance to a point that is often far beyond the real needs felt by users. Contrary to what some companies seem to think, design is not an added value to the product, but a reality that involves new synergies between design and enterprise. Creating a product means thinking out and defining what is truly valid, and finding it by observing and interpreting people's real experiences. It means changing from focusing on the product... to focusing on the user.

From focusing on the product... to focusing on the user
In a highly competitive market, user surveys applied to the design of a new product not only help businesses to innovate but also help to create value for their clients, as they provide a response to real needs and at the same time contribute excellence to the business activity.
By means of user surveys, design can turn the observation of users' everyday experiences into input for business innovation, identifying business opportunities that can be translated into new concepts for products, communication and strategies.
The methodology and philosophy of user-centred design is based on in-context research on the everyday experiences of users in the various social and cultural contexts. In order to grasp and understand this reality, research programmes usually apply a variety of techniques originating from the social sciences (video ethnography, cultural inventories, participatory observation, interviews, etc.) and based on the ethnographic method, as used in anthropology.
In research programmes it is common for interdisciplinary teams of social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists, economists, etc.), designers and technicians to work together to compile the data, analyse the information recorded, build models explaining users' experiences, and finally develop innovative solutions that can be transferred to enterprise by designing a new product and/or service.
In the course of a user survey project a series of activities and techniques are performed and used. At the research stage, which is based on data compilation and recording, field work is the chief ethnographic research activity, and involves social interaction. This exercise consists of observation and interviews, and can provide the researcher with very diverse types of information (audiovisual, written, graphic, etc.). However, in the strategic planning stage the main activity starts once the data acquisition is complete, and consists in generating an intelligible and meaningful discourse, in which the process of discovery, translation and interpretation is key for achieving the ideas and concepts for the design of the product.
The ethnographic "vision" makes it possible to study and discover everyday culture and usage thanks to the attention paid to users' experiences; in this way, these experiences can constitute the foundation of the innovation and design process of a new product.
Using these different levels we can build an interpretation of users' experiences, as everyone interacts symbolically with their surroundings. The uses and rituals to which the users subject their objects in their environment make up an experiential geography that can be interpreted and translated into various opportunities for innovation thanks to strategic planning, the new field of action for design and enterprise to establish particular synergies.

The new enterprise+design relations
The changes and the sociocultural dynamics to which we are exposed today enable us to establish new activities and uses that demand a response. That is, opportunities for innovation and for business. On the one hand, it is necessary to make a greater effort to focus innovation on achieving a better understanding of users' experiences and a smoother functioning of innovation processes in businesses with the aim of restoring the influence of marketing, technology and finances. On the other hand, it is essential to encourage the creation of a system and a training to promote a constant flux of creativity between design and enterprise.
Just as changes occur in many areas of our daily activity, the market itself - the real needs of users - also changes. Today companies cannot continue to base innovation solely on the quantitative information provided by marketing, regarding the market as a mass of stereotyped consumers behaving in a particular way, or applying new technological developments for no reason. Today there are no single types of consumers but different consumer situations, in which the most significant element is to understand the users' experiences.
Traditional market surveys only focus on segmentation models, demographic information describing who the consumers are; quantitative consumption data, describing the behaviour of these consumers in the past (market trends, sales figures and reports, etc.); and finally interviews and focus groups in which the participants are asked to give their opinion about an already established reality (a prototype for a new product, a commercial for an advertising campaign, etc.). The resulting report tends to expect a simple final answer from the designer. In contrast, user-centred design can complement this reality with user surveys that focus on studying and investigating what people actually do, say, think and want, in order to identify and reveal unarticulated needs, which will then be translated into products.
We need to observe and reflect on people's activities in their experiences: what activities are carried out, in what environments, with what interactions, with what objects, and by what users. Thinking of the market as an "entity", unrelated to its true actors, often only leads companies to the same results as their competitors: small formal variations in what already existed. This provides no "value" to either the consumer or the company, and furthermore it stops the company from making innovation the element of success and excellence that differentiates it from its competitors in the eyes of its customers.
In order to innovate and provide society and users with value, perhaps we need to "really" think about our customers and put the user at the centre of the design process of any product, space and/or service. Given that the users have neither the tools nor the resources to imagine and materialise a use by creating the form of a product (the essence of the design process), it is the responsibility of designers and entrepreneurs to do so. And they must establish the necessary synergies to ensure that what is technologically possible and what is culturally acceptable are converging realities; this is the context in which the new synergies between design and enterprise should work.

Page 76
Fashion: somewhere between the elegant and the audacious
by Pilar Pasamontes Vicepresident of FAD Fashion
Fashion historian

A Cuban friend of mine swears she can pick a Catalan out of the crowd at one of Fidel's speeches in La Habana: "You know, darling, it's so easy! When you see somebody dressed all in black just like a priest, you can bet anything you like they're from Barcelona."
It's curious that, despite the pride we take in being recognised for our "smart but discreet" image and the total absence of colour in our clothes (this colour thing's too brash for the Catalans), the Barcelona name that has the most repercussion in the worldwide fashion system is Custo Barcelona, which if it can be characterised by anything it must be its unashamed use of a wide colour range. All these years spreading the word of austere Barcelona exquisiteness, then along comes Custo Dalmau and plugs us all over the world using all the possibilities of the Pantone, with all the gay abandon that we always keep hidden away in case somebody labels us as uncool.
And however much we make out that that's really not our scene, we like it. Yes, we like it, because although it might seem otherwise, a sense of humour (intelligent, of course) gets to rubs off onto us. Let's not kid ourselves, there's a grain of truth in the reputation we have of being cautious, grumpy, inward-looking, for-goodness-sake-don't-look-at-me, stand-offish, boring. We're only great when somebody's knocking us, but since we're always being knocked, in the end we're great.
We're the product of a city that so divine that it looks like it's poker-faced, hard-working and celibate, and then turns out to be the most despicable, sinful and liberal. Do you know of any other that's come up with such deliciously outrageous places as the Casita Blanca, the Bagdad, the Metro, the Bocaccio, the Molino, the Paral·lel and the private rooms at the Liceu?
Barcelona masters the art of picking out a path between good and evil, and coming out unscathed. As a city it's always managed to adopt a lifestyle somewhere in the middle ground between the elegance comme il faut of the fifties (Pertegaz, Pedro Rodríguez, Carmen Mir and Asunción Bastida) and the audaciousness of Falstaff-Daniel Carbocci, Ferrer and Sentis-Isaac and their jeans (the unforgettable image of all those women lying on the floor trying to zip up those impossibly tight jeans), Balmes flea market, without which Barcelona would be a little less Barcelona, and Groc and Eston, in the sixties and seventies.
But then in the eighties "design" arrived like some appelation contrôlée, and we went completely overboard. Roser Marcé, Jordi Cuesta, Ramón Ramis, Luis Fortes, José Tomás… they all did a great job, but we were nearly the death of them.
And all this despite the fact that we had the chance to enjoy Estudio Buque's finest fashion parties and presentations and some unique shows (Gaudí) with the total support of the fashion world. Mythical shops that immediately became icons: Galón Glacé, Tokio, etc.
Yet we don't believe in ourselves; we nearly sink into nothingness and vanish. Just as well the fairies always appear and save us lost souls.
In today's slightly reprobate, very tolerant, timidly rebellious and magnificently Mediterranean Barcelona, the points of reference of fashion design are as variegated as its very essence.
We can mingle with the classic "divine Barcelona names": Antonio Miró, with his stupendous latest collection; Lydia Delgado (nobody like her to make you feel so divine and at the same time so Barcelona); Armand Basi, with his international quality sportwear, which apparently the Chinese rave about; Josep Font, exquisite, poetic, perfectionist and very much the couturier; Totón Comella (TCN), capable of getting lingerie and swimwear onto the catwalks thanks to her knack of making sensible Catalan women buy undies with that "I-don't-need-silk-and-lace-to-look-great" style; and Andrés Sardá, who's put his money on design mixed with technology and has managed to become one of the top international underwear firms.
In the so-called "in-betweenie generation", nobody is so representative of this city and nobody dresses men better than Josep Abril; he's got just the right touch of the avant-garde, always with an eye on the future, and with the wisdom of a man who knows that elegance isn't the same as immobility. Here too we find Spastor, with their mixture of transgression and level-headedness (it may sound like an impossible combination but they have it down to a T); Mireya Ruiz, who dares - very successfully - to dress the sort of woman who doesn't feel the need to be what others want her to be; Lebor Gabala, who designs the most exquisite and the most technologically perfect knitwear on the European market; Divinas Palabras, who have managed to make the T-shirt a cult item; Cortana, loyal to the philosophy of its creator, Rosa Esteva, namely that fashion is of no interest and the only thing that matters is clothes and how you wear them; Giménez and Zuazo, with their surprising eye for detail; lawless Gabriel Torres; and Hergenhahn with their innovative yet comfortable knitwear ideas.
The new talent on the Barcelona fashion scene have a lot in their favour: a great training (thanks to the tremendous design schools that exist in the city, including EATM, Elisava, Eina, ESDI and IED), the fact that they want to be themselves, with no room for coyness, and the platforms at their disposal to make themselves more widely known (Merkafad, Gaudí - Jóvenes Diseñadores and Circuit). Candela is intended as a space to broadcast and sell the collections of the new names: Raquel Cardona, Joan Pastor, Carmen Caparrós, Juma Alemany, Mar Modolell and Laura Figueras, among others. Pequeños Héroes is a multipurpose shop featuring young designers like Cecilia Sorensen. As for Gloria Rodríguez Figueroa, Helena Minenko and Alberto Tous, they presented their first collection in the recent edition of BCN Fashion Week, but for the moment they're still without a sales outlet. We'll have to keep tabs on them.

Page 78
Uncut diamonds
by Ricard Domingo President of the FAD Jewellers' Association

This may sound clichéd, but jewellery in Barcelona is undergoing a huge transformation. And I like to blame it on the broth.
I don't know how it is that, although it doesn't do much to encourage it, this city manages to attract a series of individuals who form a sufficiently intelligent "culture broth" to gradually change things.
And now it's really happening. This age-old craft is one of the last to be levered out of its conservatism and succumb to the influences that have marked the transformation of any other discipline in which the concepts of design are valued and put to use.
Jewellery is slowly coming to form part of modernity. And all thanks to its people.
Unfortunately, we haven't got a consolidated status as designers. We shouldn't forget that most of the businesses that operate in this sector have no designers on their books to do this work. And of course, this discipline isn't present in the design schools, despite the fact that Catalonia has a wider range of courses in design than any other part of Spain.
Nevertheless, there are a few notable firms (notable in sales and media coverage) that "sacrifice" a wage in the interests of market research, good establishments, good packaging. In short, a good image.
Neither do we have a consolidated trade fair as far as volume of business is concerned, and the centrality and monetary investment of Madrid constitute a handicap that we Catalans contribute to, instead of trying to offset it.
That said, no trade fair anywhere in Spain will ever be able to compete with the quantity and quality of creative and undeniably innovative proposals on view at our Barnajoia and Novajoia fairs.
Another negative factor is that most retailers comply with the cliché of the good shopkeeper and resist specialisation. They almost all have the same range, and they don't think about the needs of a new public who don't give jewellery the value, the classificatory power and the social and representative significance it had in the past.
Yet some jewellers stand out for having a product range that is increasingly removed from the material value of the pieces and shows off the creativity of art jewellery with a name behind it, jewellery that follows a personal artistic line, or jewellery that's in tune with the trends of the fashion world.
The problem is when someone who uses all these good things I've just described is regarded as the leading figure in Catalan jewellery, a model for all conversations, copies and trends, and they've got there by using the sugary figure of a teddy bear that can only be described by all who wear it as "cute". And incidentally, I take my hat off to that extremely well-consolidated business venture. I wish there were many more of them. Not least because of the envy we generate in the rest of Spain - without wishing to make a national issue out of a cuddly toy.
But let's get back to the soup.
I believe they'll survive this late transformation, the eternal trailblazers, those designers who, years back, used methods taken from the world of art to express their creativity, who had the will to instil jewellery with the sensitivity of the art movements of the moment and make them part of the functional and aesthetic criteria of incipient design, way back in the early sixties. Independent retailing workshops with personality, discerning designs and unbeatable customer service.
And then there are those farsighted firms that specialise in a certain type of consumer and offer them the product of their dreams...
... Retailers who renovate or are simply born with the wherewithal to run a shop that sells dreams, offering jewellery that can't be found in the franchise outlets of the ultramodern international fashion stores (who are now waking up to the importance of accessories).
... Art galleries specialising in contemporary jewellery, whose individual or group exhibitions are aimed at, and even educate, a public that is avid for new experiences in the field of body decoration. And Catalonia pioneers this too.
... And all those self-employed designers who start up small firms, following this country's ancestral instinct for business, who risk their fortune to make a go of a livelihood they find emotionally fulfilling, and who are the rank and file of the Association of which I am president.
The culture surrounding jewellery with a personality is becoming increasingly important, and consequently the role of the Jewellers' Association in the FAD is on the rise. It is the subject of a growing number of forums, debates, exhibitions, invitations, international fairs. The best example of all is the Enjoia't prize. This award is the only one in Spain to give a voice to the designs that arise out of the most experimental trends in contemporary jewellery. The fact that the contest is organised along the lines of a performance (the pieces are intended to be presented as worn) and the immediateness of the verdict, as the entire competition takes place on one day, make this unique award a festival of creativity and innovation in jewellery.
In order to coordinate, encourage and promote all this, and also to regulate the sector, we recently created the Professional Association of Jewellers, Gold and Silversmiths, Gemologists and Watchmakers of Catalonia, the first of its kind in Spain. Again we are pioneers and again they come running to imitate us.
Society is changing, and so is jewellery; it couldn't be any other way. Just think of the times we live in.
These unusable, impractical, entirely disposable, class-ridden, envied, horribly expensive objects are back again in full swing and taken up by the new generations.
The point is that we jewellers manufacture feelings, and now more than ever, the society we belong to has a need for feelings.
Don't you have a piece of jewellery that reminds you of an important event, a particular date, that's handed down from somebody you'll never forget, that binds you to somebody, that brings you luck or good company, that has an added sentimental, historical, ancestral, magical or religious value, or that serves to underscore a position or distinction - in short, that's more than just a piece of jewellery?

PAGE 82
CHRONOLOGY
by Raquel Pelta & Òscar Guayabero

1833. Josep Bonaplata starts up El Vapor, the first totally mechanised factory in Spain, in Carrer Tallers.
1836. The Nueva Vulcano factory opens.
1839. The Nueva Vulcano factory builds Spain's first steamship.
1840. Barcelona City Council makes several invitations to tender for city lighting.
Ban on paper imports, encouraging domestic production.
1842. Gas lighting introduced in Barcelona.
1844. The Industrial Institute of Catalonia organises the first Industrial Products Exhibition.
1848. Inauguration of the Barcelona-Mataró railway line, the first in Spain.
1855. Maquinista Terrestre y Marítima started up.
1860. Espasa publishing house founded.
1861. Founding of the Montaner i Simon publishing house.
1871. Societat Econòmica Barcelonesa d'Amics del País organises an exhibition on industrial themes.
1875. Catalan Crafts Institute set up at the instigation of bishop Lluch i Garriga.
1877. The University of Barcelona hosts the Exhibition of Ancient and Modern Sumptuary Arts.
More than 50 people, including Ignasi Girona, Emili Juncadella, Elies Rogent, F. Milà i Fontanals, Antoni Serret, Josep de Manjarrés, F. Miquel i Badia and Jaume Serra i Gibert, meet in the main hall of the Llotja and agree to set up an association for the promotion of the decorative arts.
1878. Francesc Vidal opens an establishment selling furniture and objets d'art in Passatge del Crèdit. The products sold there are in tune with the ideas of William Morris and encourage the creation of domestic models of simple inspiration.
1881. First issue of the daily newspaper La Vanguardia.
1883. Francesc Vidal opens a factory devoted primarily to artistic glassware and furniture.
1888. Universal Exhibition held in Barcelona. This involves completing the urbanisation of the site formerly occupied by the Citadel, carrying out other town planning improvements and stimulating local industry.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner builds the café-restaurant for the Exhibition.
1892. Artistic Industries Exhibition held in the Palace of Fine Arts.
1893. Ramon Casas returns from Paris.
1896. Alexandre de Riquer introduces the modern poster into Catalonia.
1897. Ramon Casas wins both first prizes in the poster competition organised by Anís del Mono.
1898. Spain loses its last American colonies.
Ramon Casas wins second prize in the poster competition organised by Codorniu.
The Catalan Institute of Book Arts is set up. Its first president is Josep Lluís Pellicer.
Founding of Hispano-Suiza Fábrica de Automóviles Sociedad Anónima.
1899. Lluís Domènech i Montaner designs the titlepiece of the daily newspaper La Veu de Catalunya.
Alexandre de Riquer is awarded third prize in a drop cap design competition convoked in Paris.
1900. Ramon Casas is given third prize in an international poster competition called by Cigarrillos París.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso presents an unsuccessful entry in the poster competition called by Caja de Pensión y Socorro.
1902. Sopena publishing house founded.
1903. Hispano-Suiza launch their first car.
Fomento de las Artes Decorativas (FAD) founded.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner designs the titlepiece of the daily newspaper El Poble Català.
1906. Apel·les Mestres redesigns the titlepiece of the weekly newspaper La Campana de Gràcia.
1910. Hispano-Suiza set up a factory near Paris.
1911. The magazine Bibliofilia appears, with graphic contributions by Joan Vila, "D'Ivori".
1919. Josep Obiols designs the poster for the Association for the Protection of Catalan Teaching.
1923. The FAD organises a competition entitled "For the beauty of the humble home", in which furniture designers and manufacturers are invited to design spaces and interiors using elements from Catalan folk culture.
1925. The FAD organises the Spanish delegation at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
1928. Death of Eudald Canivell, graphic arts specialist and designer of the typeface Gothic Incunabular.
1929. Barcelona International Exhibition. The Modern Movement makes the city its meeting place.
1931. The GATCPAC launches the publication of AC. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea, which acts as an organ for the dissemination of rationalist ideas in architecture.
1932. The German graphic artist Will Faber makes Barcelona his home.
1934. The FAD starts up monographic courses on decoration techniques.
1936. The GATCPAC participates in the VI Milan Triennale.
First Catalan Decorative Artists Show established, with the presence of Antoni Badrinas, Valeri Corberó, GATCPAC, Bartomeu and Jaume Llongueras, Mir i Mora and Ramon Rigol.
Coup d'état by General Franco; Civil War breaks out.
Carles Fontseré produces the first Civil War poster on 19 July.
Apel·les Mestres dies.
1937. The magazine AC folds.
1940. After the Civil War, the FAD restarts the monographic courses on decoration techniques started in 1934.
1941. Decorators Show.
1947. The FAD participates in the National Decorative Arts Exhibition held in Madrid.
Ricard Giralt-Miracle founds Filograf.
1948. Tàpies, Cuixart, Ponç and Tharrats create the Dau al Set group of artists and the magazine of the same name. Some issues are printed in Filograf, Ricard Giralt-Miracle's printworks-cum-studio.
Artigas designs the famous Polil poster showing a moth-eaten coat.
1953. The French typographer Maximiliem Vox gives a lecture in Barcelona entitled "Barcelona et la nouvelle renaissance graphique".
1954. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the FAD a design competition and exhibition are organised with the title "For the dignification of the popular home".
1960. Founding of the Association of Industrial Designers of the FAD (ADIFAD).
Ricard Giralt-Miracle designs the typeface Maryland.
1961. Elisava School founded.
Pla-Narbona, Amand Domènech, Enric Huguet, Ernest Moradell, Joan Pedragosa, Ángel Grañena, Morillas and Tomàs Vellvé, among others, set up Grafistas Agrupación FAD (later ADG-FAD).
Miquel Milà designs the TMC lamp.
ADIFAD gains international recognition during the II Congress and Assembly of the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design).
Grafistas Agrupación FAD publish the magazine Azimut.
1962. Ricard Giralt-Miracle designs the typeface Gaudí, for which he is awarded the Delta ADIFAD Prize.
Jordi Fornas designs the collection "La Cua de Palla" for Edicions 62.
1965. The Architects' Association of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands opens a permanent information centre on design in Barcelona.
1966. Eina School founded.
1967. Death of Eduard Jener, one of the great graphic artists of the thirties, who had worked with Myrurgia.
Death of the artist and designer Josep Obiols.
1968. Leopold Milà designs the Cota motorcycle for Motocicletas Montesa, S.A.
1970. Number 0 of the magazine CAU.
Launching of Avui, first Catalan-language daily newspaper after the Civil War. Titlepiece designed by Josep Vallbona.
1972. Zimmermann starts to work with the Gustavo Gili publishing house on the publication of a collection of books on design.
1974. Death of Carles Vives, who was responsible for the design of Ideales cigarettes.
First issue of the magazine Arquitecturas Bis, designed by Enric Satué.
1973. "Fundació BCD, Barcelona Centre de Disseny" created under the patronage of the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Shipping.
1975. Argentinian designers Ricardo Rousselot and Mario Eskenazi set up in Barcelona.
1982. Mario Eskenazi starts up Eskenazi & Asociados.
1983. Esteve Agulló, Josep M. Trias and Marià Pi start up Quod, Disseny i Marketing.
1985. Enric Satué redesigns the titlepiece of El Periódico de Catalunya.
1986. América Sánchez redesigns the livery of Barcelona taxis.
1987. Diari de Barcelona has a design rehaul and puts Enric Satué in charge of the new titlepiece.
1988. Jorge Pensi designs the Toledo chair.
The Catalan government sponsors the travelling exhibition "Design Catalonia".
Lluís Morillas designs the logo of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Peret designs the logo of the European technical office Eureka.
1990. Satué designs the symbol of Pompeu Fabra University.
Yves Zimmermann designs the symbol of the Royal Automobile Club of Catalonia.
1991. Ramon Benedito designs the EPH Information Desk, a tool for facilitating the management of information professionals during the Barcelona '92 Olympic Games.
Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard redesign the titlepiece of La Vanguardia.
1992. André Ricard designs the Olympic Torch for the Barcelona Games.
Death of the graphic artist Josep Artigas.
1994. Ricard Giralt-Miracle dies.
1996. Ramon Bigas, Claret Serrahima and Miquel de Moragas redesign the symbol of Barcelona City Council.
2002. Amand Domènech dies.