MACHNEWSON
A new art gallery exhibition proves the
Australian designer is number one with a bullet
Australian designer is number one with a bullet
In his redesign of the “Aquariva,” Newson says: “I decided to go a bit against the grain,
using materials uncommon to luxury boats, specifically ones that differ from the traditional
shining chrome aesthetic. I replaced stainless steel and brass with anodized aluminum. Instead
of woodfor the deck and instrument panel, I used a fiber-based laminate that retains the
organic feel and essence of wood, while being significantly more durable.”
Above: His 1999 Ford concept car is “so simple the design is completelyunforgiving,”
Newson says. “Every detail had to be perfect. It was like
designing five hundred products all at once —a terrific challenge.”
Marc Newson has devised some of the most iconic furniture in the con temporary design world, from his 1985 aluminum plate and fiberglass “Lockheed Lounge”—an example of which sold at auction last year for $1.6 million, the record for a work by a living designer—to the “Orgone” chair, the “Event Horizon” table, the “Felt” chair, and several others. But furniture, of course, is inherently inert. And the truth is that Newson is a speed demon at heart. Newson’s devotion to the physics of motion—or at least wishful, wistful representations of same—will be on display beginning September 14, when the high-octane Gagosian contemporary art gallery in downtown Manhattan opens a Newson show on the theme of “Transport.” This, the third exhibit of Newson designs that the global Gagosian operation has mounted, will present vehicles (or renditions of same) that Newson has created in his career. They include a concept car he designed for Ford in 1999; the “Kelvin40”—a jet he designed in 2003, when the Fondation Cartier gave him a carte blanche to make anything he wanted; and the “Astrium,” a spaceplane that Newson helped design at the behest of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), as part of the corporation’s bid to join the burgeoning “space tourism” industry.
Above: Newson’s metal-and-polyurethane “Nickel” surfboard, was created for riding the
largest of waves. That “requires an extremely heavy—hence stable—
hydrodynamicform that can behave as predictably as possible in the water,” he explains.
“The surfboard works unbelievably well in extreme conditions. It is literally a knife in the water.”
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| Working on the EADS “Astrium” spaceplane—shown in a rendering, along with a mock-up of the craft’s interior—was a dream come true for the astro-fascinated Newson. His brief was to design the cabin, but he also made suggestions on the hull design. The plan is for the “Astrium” to rocket a complement of four passengers 60 miles above the earth, where they will experience three minutes of zero gravity. Newson intends to be aboard the first flight, but adds: “I don’t think it will be getting off the ground too soon. It’s unfortunate but anything to do with space suffers in times of economic crisis.” |
The star of the show will be a powerboat: the “Aquariva by Marc Newson,” the designer’s take on the signature vessel of the Italian luxury speedboat-maker Riva, a firm and a craft both legendary among powerboating fans. “It was one of those interesting situations where you are given a very well-known and revered object and you have to find a way to make it your own, but not lose the essence of the original,” Newson says. “I wanted the boat to look timeless: very, very slick, very much understated, and very, very cool.” It’s also very, very fast—predicted top speed: 130 nautical miles-per-hour—and very, very expensive. Only twenty-two of the Newson boats will be made, each priced at $1.5 million. To those in the chips: ahoy! M
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| When the Fondation Cartier invited Newson to design anything he wished for the organization’s collection, he says, “There was no hesitation—I wanted to design a concept jet. I loved airplanes long before I knew what they really represented in terms of materials and technologies. I loved that planes took you places; that they were fast and streamlined and inherently beautiful. The “Kelvin40” has no commercial reason for being. It was just pure fun. The plane can’t fly—for a lot of reasons, legal and technical—but it’s the first step in the development of a product that would really fly. Aerodynamically it would fly very well.” |
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Voyage to the Past
by Amy Silver
Photography by Jan-Willem Koene
Vintage Photographs by Harry Mosch
Vintage Photographs by Harry Mosch
Perhaps the last grand ocean liner built, the SS Rotterdam, restored to its mid-century splendor and now permanently docked in its eponymous home port as a hotel and conference center, transports passengers to an earlier, stylish time.
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| The ship moored in Rotterdam Harbor |
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| Ship moored with Euromast tower at the far right. |
Sea cruises have a bit of a mixed reputation these days. At one end of the spectrum, educational institutions, cultural organizations, and even high-brow magazines employ ships as waterborne classrooms, offering edifying seminars and guided tours of ports of call. At the other end, cruise ships are seen merely as massive floating hotels. They plough their way across the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, dismissed as either seagoing disco-era swingers’ clubs or as chugging childcare centers—where parents take their noisy little ones to be entertained by water slides and rock climbing walls.
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| The outdoor swimming pool on the Lido deck in a photograph from the 1960s |
What’s true is that the grand days of trans-ocean travel are long gone, victim to the expedience (notwithstanding the attendant boredom and annoyances) of commercial air travel. But there are still ways to get a taste of the elegance of first-class seagoing—provided you don’t mind that the ship goes nowhere. After undergoing sea trials, the SS Rotterdam welcomed its first passengers in 1959, its sleek and snappy public rooms making it the pride of the Holland America Line. While the streamlined passenger ships of the early twentieth century inspired the cool white minimalism of Le Corbusier in the 1920s, the interiors of the Rotterdam were intended to be lush, decorative, and lyrical—a reflection of postwar optimism and a renewed focus on humanism and a bright, sunny lifestyle.
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| The room divider at the entrance of the Smoking Room, with bronze-framed plexiglass blocks encapsulating sea life and insects, was designed by E.S. Wyvern and carried out by the biologydepartmentof thefirm Europlastic of Hilversum, Netherlands. |
Her days as a classic, multiclass, luxury liner were numbered, and by 1971 the Rotterdam was converted to a one-class cruise ship, mainly plying the Caribbean in winter and taking voyages to Alaska in summer. By 2000 the ship’s future was in doubt: sold to the American company Premier Cruises, it was seemingly headed for the scrap yard, as various plans to update the vessel (which would require an enormous asbestos cleanup, for example) rose and sank. Then in 2004 a preservation campaign led by both commercial interests and maritime design lovers spared the ship from the junk heap. As Klaas Krijnen, campaign member and adviser on the restoration, explains: “The S S Rotterdam had to be saved because she is one of the very last ocean liners from the 1950s. She was still in very good condition with most of the original interior on board. She is a piece of maritime, cultural, and technical heritage.” The Rotterdam was docked for restoration, where advisers matched colors, fittings, and materials as accurately as possible. According to Krijnen more than five thousand pieces of original furniture were sent to Italy to be reupholstered.
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| The Forecourt, designed by C.L.W. Wirtz, forms the entrance to the Smoking Room, Card Room, and Library, all designed by Wirtz. |
The effort is to be applauded, as the Rotterdam’s public rooms reflect the efforts of a who’s who of mid-century Dutch designers, architects, and artists. Notable figures included Huig Aart Maaskant (best known for his design of the Hilton Amsterdam, where John Lennon and Yoko One staged their famed 1969 “Bed-In” protest against the Vietnam War), interior designer H. P. Mutters, and J. A. van Tienhoven, a master designer of ship interiors with a humorous preference for austere cabin design. As van Tienhoven once mused: “Whenever a hotel room is fitted out with a shower, a bed and a sofa, the guest would rather take a bottle of whiskey to his room than to take his place in the restaurant. Aboard ship you have the additional issue that should all the passengers remain in their cabins, the service problem would become insoluble. From an economic standpoint, then, a cabin should not be too comfortable!”
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| Grand Ballroom designed by architect Joost Schuil. The lacquer mural is by by Cuno van den Steene. |
Indeed, the emphasis on the Rotterdam is firmly directed toward the public spaces. The Grand Ballroom, the ship’s premier room, was designed by architect Joost Schuil as a sort of underwater world. Split over two levels at the bow of the ship, it features a grand staircase with a bronze handrail by Leo Brom of fish escaping from a sea monster only to be captured in an intricate fishing net. Glass ceiling panels are lined with colored illuminated tubes to suggest a sea creature’s view of the ocean’s surface. An irregularly shaped ceramic tile dance floor evokes dancing on the seabed, while a twenty-four-meter-long lacquer painting by Cuno van den Steene depicts misty mountain terrain, standing as the earthly contrast to this submerged fantasy.
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| The bar in the Ambassador Lounge. Visible in the background are some of the rosewood room dividers with their distinctive porthole-like glass inserts |
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| A 1960s photograph |
For less formal evenings, the Ambassador Lounge was, and continues to be, a solid favorite. A van Tienhoven design, it can only be described as the swankiest nightspot on board. Designed for intimacy, the room has a space age aesthetic. Rosewood screens set with porthole-like silvered glass circles edged in bronze- and gold-anodized aluminum divide the space, and nooks of chairs in red and purple and yellow vinyl circle the star-shaped dance floor.
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| The Tropic Bar, designed by Wirtz, was intended for first-class passengers. The mural, entitled Tropical Nights, by Wally Elenbaas. |
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| La Fontaine Dining Room by J.A. van Tienhoven. The ceramic friezes were designed by Nico Nagler, who was inspired by the fables of Jean de la Fontaine. |
This attention to detail is extended throughout the ship, with an astonishing collection of art adorning the public spaces and corridors. In modern abstract style, many of these works feature geographic or ethnographic imagery often depicting scenes from the classics. The two main dining rooms feature, respectively, figures inspired by Homer’s Odyssey and by Jean de la Fontaine’s fables in ceramic reliefs designed by Nico Nagler. The main staircase is lined with applique glass panels designed by artist W. Akkermans, which, over the six flights from the lower holds to the upper deck, depict a transforming landscape from the seabed to the cosmos. The Club Room contains four large tapestries inspired by the changing appearance of classical gods in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Originallydesigned by the abstract artist Gisele van Waterschoot van der Gracht, they have been beautifully remade under the supervision of the original weaver at the Textile Museum in Tilburg in the Netherlands, the originals having been lost after the ship was retired from service.
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| The Club Room, designed by Jacques Semy, is also adorned with replicas of the four original tapestries designed by Gisele van Waterschoot van der Gracht |
As of February 2010, the ship is permanently docked in Rotterdam Harbor, and is open to the public as a museum, hotel, restaurant, bar lounge, and conference center. Good design is timeless, and the Rotterdam is just that. Though cruise liners’ practical worth as transport has passed, around the world cruising has never been more popular. Contemporary vessels, with their casino-style decor and theme park attractions, could learn a thing or two from this elegant old dame of the sea. The Rotterdam stands as a flagship for good taste in a sea of mediocrity. M
Amy Silver is an Amsterdam-based writer.
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| The Queen’s Lounge, which spans the entire width of the ship, was designed by H. P. Mutters to accomodate 500 passengers. Inlaid in the aspen wall are designs evoking fish nets. |
