Art, Architecture and Design Professionals On TFOD

Often, seemingly inane forwarded messages lead to beautiful discoveries. Stefano Furlani was one such, for me. When I received on my cell phone a series of images of stone art - without due credits,  mind you – I went online to ‘search’ their source. Stefano Furlani was the name that instantly popped up; and given the fact that these images have gone viral, it wasn’t surprising at all. So, from a faraway town in Italy, here are some incredible compositions in stone!

It is 2019, and right around the corner is 2020. Climate change due to unchecked fossil carbon emissions and its consequential threat to life as we know it on our planet is proven, accepted and looming large, notwithstanding the naysayers. According to the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction 2018 Global Status Report, building construction and operations account for nearly 40% of global CO2 emissions. Clearly, as a bulk contributor to the resulting climate change, the construction industry has the onus of initiating the process of redressal for this damage as well. And, even more clearly, it is in the design and the technology of building, in how and with what we build that needs to revolutionise in order to effect any real redressal or change. The problem having thus been brought to the doorstep of the designers, the architects and engineers, the fraternity has been recently intensely invested in research for innovative solutions to it. The resultant breaking news comes from the UK firm Foster + Partners, one of the leading architectural practices worldwide, who have pledged to go completely carbon neutral in all their new buildings by 2030, and even in their existing projects by 2050.

Ieoh Ming Pei, an ideal  life and an ideal architect of the century gone by, breathed his last earlier this month after a brilliant life of 102 years. Personally, this funny looking, gentle, affable 1930s Chinese import to the land of promise and opportunity, USA, was no less than a God ever since I was introduced to his life and work in my early days as an architecture student. My introduction to Pei through, of course, his Magnum Opus in the Glass Pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris, led me to find out more about the life and works of this Chinese-American architect, and understand the philosophy he espoused. In whatever I have found till date – from the Chinese schoolboy who dreamed the American dream to the way he pursued and lived that dream with steadfast yet gentle commitment, his sagely patience at handling the challenges in his career to his calm and contented enjoyment of his successes, his resolutely firm adherence to his own convictions in any design to his innovative flexibility in resolving issues, the simultaneous sagacity and humour, humility and authority that his personality exuded – all make him worthy of reverence and emulation. To have this opportunity to pay this written tribute to this genius is, indeed, an unforeseen pleasure.

If there’s art inside you, it finds a way of coming out and expressing itself. We designers give vent to our inner art on the spaces that surround us. Fashion designers express their art through apparel, sculptors do it through the forms they give to materials, and painters simply let it spread out on a canvas and so on. Then there are those of us who manifest our aesthetic aptitude through multiple outlets, most of us do so, in fact. But, very few make successful careers out of each of the pens or brushes we wield or hats we put on. New York based designer and artist Lisa Perry is one of these few who translated popular art works onto her equally successful fashion line and then these two skills found their way into homes designed by her to influence a popular range of interiors as well. Perhaps one of the pioneers of the trend of creating ‘signature homes designed by fashion icons’, Perry has been showing how an innate artistic sense can be leveraged into different creative forms.

The design of hospitals or health care facilities is dealt with primarily as a technical poser in most endeavours by architects worldwide. Creativity in these usually gets reserved for the treatment, material and massing of the façade, or for the deployment of ingenuity in getting natural light, ventilation and views inside the building On initial analysis, the New Sulaibikhat Clinic in Kuwait designed by international (Kuwait and Madrid based) firm AGi architects is also about these very parameters. But, the strikingly beautiful articulation it finds as well as the innovative arrangement of the layout set it apart as worthy of a detailed examination.