NEW YOUNGSTERS ARE ARRIVING

Many still-unknown names, others in the process of maturing their creations, are changing the Brazilian design landscape for objects, accessories and other treasures.

Maria Helena Estrada
“Adaptation was never a problem. And our tradition of authenticity is one of creatively accepting the experience of others. We take what we have, make use of the ideas of those who went before, we mix it all out in a cauldron of generous ethnic influences, with a great deal of fat chicken soup”, wrote Nina Horta in the gastronomy column of the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo on September 27.
Extracting the chicken soup, our attention is called by this subtle vision of our identity. Doesn’t the same thing happen in design?
With each new generation the project is perfected, and a few more pinches of technology with new materials are added and new ideas are formed in the air.
But the five centuries built with wood do not go unremembered by our designers (they’re enough, aren’t they?). What about looking to the sides and discovering the fibers, the bamboo, the rubber?
One goes forward, it’s true, but the bad habits remain. Each new generation returns to the lack of research and haste, which makes it mistake the first prototype for the final product; the easy acceptance of the first solution encountered; the dangerous sheet of polystyrene, or similar materials of a different nature, capable of reducing efforts and aspirations; conformity in the face of the already mentioned “possible design”(see the article on the MCB competition), which certainly is not the desired design.
The industrial design schools, at least some of them, are playing a fundamental role in inserting the designer into the industrial process. In the opinion of Cyntia Malaguti, designer, teacher and consultant to the State of São Paulo Federation of Industry (FIESP), “today there is very much greater understanding by businessmen with regard to designers who also have a better understanding of industrial reality. A great distance has been covered and partnerships are beginning to happen. In this process, the schools make the agreements with the companies”.
Really, when we receive a project from a student or former student, from a designer who comes from a good school, one notices immediately. This is the case of the ceramic oven, of Paula Dib (student at FAAP), and the motorized scooter, of Fabio Fernandes, a student at the Federal University of Paraná. Lack of academic training reveals the great fragility of many solutions and projects.
Good ideas, yes. They always arise. With these good ideas, we could form the basis for a new aesthetics. But without adequate tools, the ideas are launched like kites in the wind: they call attention, rise and disappear.
If our prospecting, in this edition, shows many isolated examples of projects, we had the pleasure of seeing NoTech being born, a movement or collection, with projects from a group of designers.
Where did NoTech come from?
From a course which began in an unassuming way, with classes held almost always outside, on the staircase at MUBE, in São Paulo, with two “masters”, who wanted to be interlocutors, or provoke with ideas – Fernando and Humberto Campana –, and a group of youngsters who were willing to make a design with their hands.
The new fact is that for many decades we haven’t seen in Brazil what could be called a “school” or ‘movement” (even in arts) or, that is, a group of people, almost all of whom are young, working together on common ideas. Really, in Brazilian design, we can only recall the “White and Black” movement, during the sixties, comprised of a group of architects who were also furniture designers and worked together on the same esthetic and formal concepts. Apart from this example, no “school was created”; nobody founded the bases of Brazilian aesthetics.
Now a group of youngsters, almost without realizing it, managed this achievement.
Everything started with the classes, or better, the workshops. The Campana brothers brought with their farm boys’ memory, this way of working with the hands, using whatever was left over or any twig found close at hand; a look that traverses the material and redefines its destiny. A particular attitude of doing, experimenting, entering each material’s soul in order to understand what it wants to say.
It was this intuitive knowledge that contaminated their students and which enabled those classes to give rise to a collection of objects with its own language, coherent between themselves, expressing an identical intention.
Brazilian aesthetics? Perhaps. Nothing was invented. Various designers in other countries employ transposition of materials’ utilization. What is new is the Brazilian look – free, light, unfettered, colored, gentle and good-humored.
New, and very old, this is the recipe from the Brazilian soul about which the “food designer” or snack specialist, Nina Horta, was talking at the beginning of these reflections on Brazilian design.