Ab Rogers/UK
Ab Rogers Design (ARD), London
Whether through nature or nurture, design is certainly elemental in Ab Rogers’ stock in trade.
Son of Lord Richard, and Su Brumwell, an architect in her own right, stepson respectively of Ruth Rogers of the famous River Café, and architect John Miller, Ab Rogers could easily have dined out on his creative pedigree.
That he chose a circuitous path home - leaving school at 16 and only returning to study at the RCA some 12 years later, is reflected in the deceptively free-form, adventurous spirit that imbues his work.
Today, Ab Rogers is himself at the helm of a burgeoning London-based multi-disciplinary design practice that explores the challenge of space.
Ab (pronounced ‘Abe’ with an ‘e’) trained initially as a cabinet-maker. In 1989, stirred by wanderlust and the prohibitive rental costs of a London studio, Ab made for Liverpool where he set up a small concern specialising in custom-made furniture. Dipping his foot into the waters of collaboration, Ab founded Ahead Ahead, a multidisciplinary design and production collective, before the lure of the sea saw him up sticks in 1993 and set sail on a 12-month odyssey around the Mediterranean, Caribbean, through the Panama Canal and three Trans-Atlantic crossings.
In 2004, he set up his own studio Ab Rogers Design (ARD), a multi-disciplinary practice that combines graphics, product, interior and packaging design, installations and branding. Institutional clients include the Tate Modern, the V&A, London’s Science Museum, and Melbourne’s own Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
His style is energetic, primary-hued and forthright, more in keeping with the young Georgian retail maven Katia Gomiashvili who commissioned him to freely render her Mayfair store Emperor Moth on London’s tony Mount Street, than the landscape of its heritage setting.
Inside, like a moth to a flame, a kaleidoscopic collision of inspirations ranging from the Russian constructivists to puppetry, Roger Smithson’s mirror images; film in the Spike Jonze/John Malkovich collaboration, to French icon Nikki de Saint Phalle conflate on the border where art meets design. In a less deft, assured hand, a modernist mêlée could well have erupted.
In contrast, is the relative austerity – fire engine red fibreglass notwithstanding - of the 2001 comme des garçons Paris shop fit-out for fashion legend Rei Kawakubo that garnered Ab’s studio, Shona and Dominic Robson of BLINK! a rare combination of immediate celebrity and industry acclaim. More recently, the eye-catching interiors of Michel Guillon’s optometry store on the King’s Road operate as both an installation and a shop display case, where hundreds of spectacles housed in individual cubicles, push out of the cerulean wall skin to present themselves only to disappear again.
Sensorily attuned to the environment at hand, Ab’s creative vision is singularly design focused; he thinks in double time, and speaks twice as rapidly with a kinetic passion for his discipline that articulates lineage and learning curve.
Both discursive and intuitive, Ab is a space creator whose playing field is open wide.
In collaboration with graphic designers David Tanguy and Régine Stéfan of Praline, the Richard Greenwood partnership, Dominic Robson, DA.studio, Giuseppe Bartolini, Hijack and Marina Willer, Ab designed the installation of his father’s retrospective “Richard Rogers + Architects — From the House to the City” at London’s Design Museum referencing the senior Rogers’ architectural modalities in the iconic Zip-Up house and the co-creation with Renzo Piano of the Pompidou centre, where the installation fittingly debuted.
A vibrant study in restrained ‘exhibitionism’, the displays invite discussion and exploration of the city through the Rogers oeuvre, a subtly referential and a reverential tribute to the parent and the company he keeps.
Ab, his wife the chef Sophie Braimbridge, and their two daughters, live in the house his father (with then wife Sue) designed for his parents in 1968. The Dr Rogers House is a mirror image of the generational relationship, colourful, open, dynamic, sustained, perhaps the most successful collaboration of all.
ARD’s reputation as one of the most inventive design teams at work in the world’s cultural sectors, has brought Ab to Melbourne to reimagine a large scale space for ACMI. In partnership with Denton Corker Marshall, the new multi-million dollar permanent gallery will uniquely document, and likely invade, the past, present and future of the moving image in all its forms.
Ab talks Design Victoria through the ABC of his design knowledge, propositions that deconstruct the object only to rebuild it afresh, finding the “edge to unravel” and making things happen.
DV: You’ve done several institutional installations with museums including the Tate, the V&A and now with ACMI. Is there a differing sensibility to the manner in which you approach these than to the retail projects or the domestic commissions?
AR: Traditionally, we started in galleries doing installations, very art-based to an extent, and we rather ‘fell into’ retail and then branched into exhibitions. The process is really very similar – it’s about understanding the problem, really getting excited about what the problem could be, and being passionate about the possible solution.
And trying to get the people to engage. If it’s a retail environment, you want the shoppers to engage with the clothing, the objects, the glasses… If it’s a museum, you want the people to engage in the artwork. Often with art, it’s about creating these rather lavish environments in a way, but they’re lavish environments in which you want the content to be ‘the hero’. Rather than creating a minimal plinth, and sticking your icon, your hero worship on the plinth, we try to create an environment that is as challenging as the object itself, so it becomes a totality, in a way.
DV: Does that require a kind of complicity from the author of the object?
AR: No, but it means that we really need to understand the object itself, something we love doing. Being very earnest about the process – rather like ‘method designing’, I suppose. If it’s comme des garçons, it’s really trying to understand the brand, what it is, what the clothes are, what they represent… how we can make them really come alive. With the spectacles, it’s investigating the procedure of trying glasses on, having your eyes tested, wearing glasses … elements like that. And, then looking at the equipment and trying to find an edge. For us, that is a starting point. Trying to find an edge that we can start to unravel, so we can create this tapestry that becomes an exhibition, or a shop. And we are now doing domestic commissions… but we do use the same methodology.
DV: You’ve said that you grew up ‘marinated in architecture” and design. But the dynastic element is played out in not just the obvious father/son heritage – your stepmother and wife in creative cuisine, architect stepfather and mother… which goes to the multi-discipline aspect of your own practice. You can be fortunate to come from it, or you can rail against it. Was there a combination of both for you?
AR: I left school very early when I was 16 and obviously had very little in the way of qualifications. I wanted to travel around the world and be a carpenter and have nothing to do with design. I did an apprenticeship and then worked as a cabinet-maker for ten years and as such, when you’re making someone’s kitchen you really have to do the design as well, particularly at the lower end of the market where I was working. And I got more excited by the possibilities of design in a real sense.
Then we moved to Liverpool in pursuit of the affordable studio and became involved in the Northwest art scene, helping putting on exhibitions. So, it came about in a very unconscious way. Before I knew it, I was designing.
At age 28, I then went off to the Royal College and that initiated a change in my whole perception of what design was and how.
DV: In what sense? Was it more formalised or more broadening?
AR: More of a discovery in the sense that there were so many interesting things going on; you could dig very deep, you could really push materials, play with them, and in fact, I think one of the most exciting discoveries I had was to really push something, the more radical you were, was almost more commercial in many ways, than creating something that was a ‘me to’ project. Depending on how you work. For me, I’m not good at creating a very elegant, simple solution. I’m much better at creating something that is a larger broadbrush take on a space, or on an object. To try to challenge the way we use it, or perform in it. But I think when you talked before about marination, a lot of my influences come from art, food, from animals… It’s getting excited by things you see around you.
DV: Does it take a particular sort of person to be a collaborator in your area of interest and expertise?
AR: I think it takes somebody who is very passionate and totally sincere about what they do. People say that my work is ‘wacky’ sometimes, which I find really insulting because I take [my work] very seriously. Humorous, yes – making people laugh, I think is incredibly important and we try to do that but it’s always for a reason. It’s under-pinned by an ambition to create something that is sincerely singing the song that the content wants to hear, even though the content didn’t necessarily know that it wanted to hear that song…
DV: How do you choose collaborators?
AR: When I left the Royal College, I was in a partnership with Shona Kitchen and we both taught half time so we didn’t have to bring work in [constantly]. So, for the first four years, we earned absolutely nothing from the practice. But we did exciting things in strange gallery spaces and people … noticed those things. Out of the blue, we got the comme des garçons commission in Paris, and if I’m brutally honest, I probably didn’t know much about ‘cdg’ at that point. But it was such an amazing opportunity to work with someone as incredibly talented as Rei Kawakubo, and on a project that was so high profile and for a client that was so legendary. Clients are such an important part of the process and to have a client who was so rigorous and really pushed us… She would be concerned about everything she signed off on from an access panel to the screws we were using. We learned a huge amount from that meticulousness. But it was quite a few years later that we became commercially successful.
DV: Was it a surprise that the style you originated became commercially successful?
AR: Yes, because we didn’t set out to be commercially successful. We set out to be edgy and confusing. And it is a surprise still, continuously whenever we win a project! It is an interesting situation because most of our work is repeat clients.
Actually, it goes to the question you asked about choosing collaborators. Collaborators are easy to choose because if you have a commission, you seek to work with someone who does something amazing, like [illustrator/collaborator] Sara Fanelli at the Tate Modern … but I’ve never really chosen clients. It’s largely been a word-of-mouth process. CDG got a huge amount of publicity; we were very young and unestablished and the press liked that.
The work then comes and you make what you can out of it. You get to know your clients and they get to know you, what they like, what they don’t like but one can become really complacent. So equally, you need to have the awareness that some jobs are not worth killing yourself over, but then some are. It’s really about knowing which ones you can push. ACMI is for instance, a brilliant opportunity to do something incredibly exciting. It’s a wonderful space, very enthusiastic, flexible clients.
I think what’s really good about our situation now is that when people select us it’s because of what we do, the body of work. It’s more tricky with retail in general because retail often has ambitions to be much more daring than the courage of the clients. They like to choose a daring, edgy designer and then try to get them to do something that is very pedestrian which always seems incredibly illogical. So we try to choose our clients now, trying to avoid those who can be just too frustrating. And it’s not in their interests to choose us either.
DV: In reference to the Emperor Moth project on London’s rather established Mount Street, within the British design environment, did you perceive differences in what you thought you could achieve in comparison to say, in Paris with CDG?
AR: Well, Emperor Moth was my dream client. A favourite project. [Katia Gomiashvili] came through a PR company and she arrived, incredibly beautiful, super energetic… very Georgian as Georgians are. She told us she wanted to create a shop full of movement, colour and vibrancy, which was a brilliant start. We’d seen ‘The Tarot Garden’ by [artist/sculptor] Nikki de Saint Phalle in Tuscany, one of my favourite installations, using tarot cards full of mosaic mirror and, along with a couple of other things, I’d become quite obsessed with it.
Katia’s clothes too were incredibly vibrant, with an amazing colour to them, so we began to hatch this plan whereby to create the colour in the shop we wouldn’t actually have colour. We’d just use mirror to reflect the clothes.
I had one very brief meeting with her in London and she flew me out to Moscow to go see her set up. In the meantime, we built a model, Moscow site unseen, knowing very little. Quite risky but we were quite instinctive about this project. After a 40-minute presentation, she just said ‘yes’.
The only time she ever said ‘no’ to us is when we would try to rationalise it, thinking some of our ideas were too over-the-top.
And now we are doing [Katia’s] house. It’s fantastically impractical in many ways. A fun palace. A spiral staircase that has 52 different colours as it radiates around. A slide inside, a rotating bed so she can adjust the views. We are collaborating with the artist Richard Wood on the floors, who like his name, hates fake wooden floors. It’s another dream project from her.
DV: Do you find that in a globalised market, when you are increasingly dealing with clients from a diversity of cultures, who have few preconceived ideas of the de rigueur style or process that it can be liberating professionally?
AR: There is a much more open-minded side to these projects. A kitchen doesn’t need to be as it is; you can do things for different reasons, for emotion, for passion. Katia is very passionate for example, and loves space and light and loves to push the boundaries. I love working with people from different cultures. Sixty per cent of our work is international and every culture has its own wonderments.
DV: How is technology or specialisation changing the multidisciplinary side of the design sector sensibility both from an educative and practicing perspective?
AR: I think the danger of technology is the falsehood that anyone can do anything with it. There is a massive misconception that if you can use the software you can design. You see it in graphics more than any other discipline – I really believe that there’s more bad graphics out there at the moment than ever has been. And it’s true in many situations. You no longer need to have done the craft, apparently. On the other hand, from a teaching perspective, my favourite degree show to go and see is always the print-making course at the Royal College because you see no print-making, they do everything else but print-making within the course!
The course that Ron Arad has just set up at the RCA is important. You’re taught creativity to an extent, it’s going back to a foundation course, a general introduction to the liberal arts. Having said that, you risk ending up knowing too little about a lot of things. You can’t explore Shakespeare in two weeks! It’s that balance between trying to find a way to teach art that is open, but not too skill-based so you’re not just teaching this catalogue of different skills and softwares. Software is irrelevant. It’s about the mind.
DV: Can you ‘teach’ creativity?
AR: I think that you can simulate situations. I taught quite a lot and I had a sudden terrible revelation when I was employing my students that none of them knew any of the key great conceptual thinkers - they could make brilliant films, and do very funny things, they could execute technical drawings … and I had this realisation that I’d been teaching for five years and I’d produced all these students who couldn’t think beyond that. There were those who could, but I think they were self-taught!
DV: What is on the design storyboard for the ACMI project?
AR: What we are essentially trying to do is invade the angular dark, tough space - which is fantastic in design - I love the architecture but it’s dark and angular, quite low ceilinged and goes back with little daylight. So, we are trying to flood it with vibrant colours and soft materials as a counterbalance. [One concept] is a sweeping bamboo organic structure that flows around the wall.
DV: What is the role of the designer in the next few years in terms of sustainability and eco-awareness?
AR: It’s really interesting – the more constraints you have in a design brief, the better you design. For the artist, the ultimate commission is a blank piece of paper. For me, I prefer more constraint, in a way. You can disobey a brief; make it slightly anarchic– something to rail against – but not to an extreme, obviously.
Sustainability is very important and I completely believe in it but not in a tokenistic sense. I remember having lectures at the Royal College on products made from recycled toothbrushes and they were such idiotic materials, useless. And the structure was dynamic: what is the point of creating something which is so clumsy that you’ll end up consuming more steel to make it stand up because it has no structural integrity?
We need to design in a way that things last. That we don’t have to change with the times, fashions or trends, to be flexible, to be able to take things with you. My thesis at the RCA was entitled ‘Liberation of Lost Voids’, from the perspective of a builder where you go in rip out kitchens, replace them with other kitchens which look just the same but different. I found that was such a depressing way to work. So this was about not making everything fitted. You would own your own staircase and take that staircase with you everywhere you went because you were investing in objects and moving away from the throwaway world. No matter how sustainably a thing is made, if it’s throwaway, it’s unsustainable. It’s the idea of bringing value back to objects – we love things, and we treasure them, therefore they will last. You can then excuse a much higher investment in its materials and making.
DV: Does that demand a shift in thinking for the consumer?
AB: It’s a culture shift in thinking for the consumer, very much so. But for all of us, in that we don’t need to change things all the time for the sake of it. And finding ways to do that through manufacture, through production. This is hard because if someone is producing a faster, better computer every four weeks… But awareness is half the battle and I think that there is a changing mentality. It’s more about changing the way people think rather than just small behaviours. Now, teaching sustainable design courses is another story. It’s a very complicated issue and one I don’t think the courses are handling well. I was reading recently about the idea of making all your objects from carbon fibre, which is very negative in terms of consumption, but the weight that you would save in moving all your objects around would be huge. Everything swings in the argument.
DV: Do you have a dream commission?
AR: Not really. Katia’s work and ACMI are ‘dream commissions’… For me the conversation is important. And is one of the reasons I was very excited to get out of certain types of retail design into the museum environments. To be able to sit and discuss art or moving image, how to get people to engage, is much more exciting than talking about trying to maximise the commerciality of a pair of jeans – I find that less interesting. Having said that we are doing an eco-store and a series of [TV shops for the internet], which is great because we are working with a really intelligent branding company and you’re there for the right reasons. They understand how we work, and vice versa and it’s professional. Working with developers is interesting because they know their process.
To be a designer, having an idea is absolutely irrelevant to some extent; it’s being able to deliver. It’s about the process, it’s about ‘getting it’, and getting it right; it’s getting it made beautifully and to last, it’s got to have functionality to it, it has to have form, and it has to feel amazing.
I was quite excited about coming here because you have brilliant builders. They want to make amazing things. And they do. Without dynamic, excited builders/fabricators, we [as designers] can’t do anything. I have a very close team of fabricators and makers who are tremendous collaborators and in many ways, they are most important because they make things happen. And I really treasure those relationships. Designing is only the half of it. Making it is the other half.
Design Victoria spoke to Ab Rogers when he presented at the 2008 AGIdeas three day Design Forum.
Related Links
Ab Rogers Design — www.abrogers.com
ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) — www.acmi.net.au
AGIdeas — www.agideas.net
Lani Steinberg for Design Victoria
26 August 2008