Product Design by Zuhanna Gralwood

Author: Zhongqing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-08-23
Features: Hannah Grawunder is an architect and designer based in Milan and San Francisco. She has been a partner of the design company Sottsass Associati in Milan since 1989. This book selects ten representative series of works, presenting Hannah Grawunder's design philosophy and unique concepts in material application, particularly her appealing approach to lighting design, bringing a natural and mysterious atmosphere to every user.
Detailed Introduction: WMF is a large German stainless steel company. WMF produces a series of design works, including the "X" ashtray. This ashtray is designed specifically for cigar smokers and is made of black ceramic. Hannah was interviewed by the magazine "Cigar" in 1998 and said, "Designing an ashtray requires considering many special aspects. First, the ashtray should be quite sensual because smoking a cigar is a sensual activity. I think this analogy is easy to understand. I really enjoy smoking cigars and consider it a form of aesthetic enjoyment. When smoking a cigar, the entire room is filled with smoke, and the light becomes softer, and the boundaries of everything become blurred. I like these blurred boundaries." Hannah Grawunder is an architect and designer based in Milan and San Francisco. Since 1989, she has been a partner of the design company Sottsass Associati in Milan. She has been responsible for some of the company's most important architectural projects with Ettore Sottsass. The works presented in this book are her personal works, though created separately, they reflect her architectural design activities. Most of the projects introduced in this book are created for gallery or museum exhibitions, with rather unique production processes. Many products are produced in only one version, such as the "MEMES" glass and the "Air Conditioning" series, which are limited production. Some projects, such as "Lighting Management" or products designed for WMF, are mass-produced, but this is relatively speaking. These projects constitute a comprehensive exploration of her personal design style, a language that is directly inspired by modern landscapes and cultural technological aesthetics. They are just some "possibilities" to be realized through the use of composite materials, production processes, electronic imagery, cross-cultural references, and the richness of light and color.
Excerpt: The "Air Conditioning" series, a collection of furniture and lighting, was designed for the Milan Design Gallery and exhibited at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1995. The Milan Design Gallery was the producer of the Memphis series in the 1980s, producing and selling works by many designers. This series includes stands, cabinets, lamps, tables, and wooden or metal tabletops, some of which are made of rubber, while others are decorated with woven steel surfaces. The lamps in this series, especially with industrial finishes and exposed hinges, car mirrors, LED lights, car headlights, and colored neon lights, create a special atmosphere, a modern urban atmosphere: this means imitating the Southern California highway or submitting to the neon-blinking metropolises like Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Delhi. A typical contemporary city is filled with computers, televisions, car parts, and flickering lights. Objectively speaking, in the words of the designer, this reflects the intervention of nihilism in the "beautiful design of the ideal world." Hannah wrote in the magazine "Vibrators" in 1997, "Think about the various changes in the city: billboards, flickering skyscrapers, blurry lights, flashing traffic lights. Reflective sunglasses, dazzling fluorescent paintings. This series is made of new materials, LSD fabric, artificial changes, and the varying degrees of elegance in the entire set of works fully reflect the state of the world today."
Lighting Management: These lamps and furniture were produced in 1997 for the Milan Postal Design Gallery and were custom-made according to the client's direct requirements to coordinate the installation with the actual physical space. These lamps and furniture were designed more as architectural products than as furniture pieces, responding to their actual productive exigencies, such as construction methods, quantity of edition, and the specific requirements of the consumer. Ettore Sottsass wrote in the introduction to the "Lighting Management" catalogue in 1997: "Contemporary nights are filled with flickering, luminous ghosts that float out of intrusive televisions. They are filled with streets defined by light, endless artificial lights, endless catalogues of colors. We continually receive information that reaches our eyes in the form of artificial light, and perhaps a large part of our knowledge of events around the world reaches us through light. I believe this to be, more or less, the continuous aspect of the landscape that is the drug of Hannah Grawunder's imagination."
Ettore Sottsass – Introduction to "Lighting Management" Catalogue – 1997.