DESIGNER OF THE YEAR AWARD GOES TO CAMPANA BROTHERS; TOYO ITO WINS KIESLER PRIZE
Brazilian designers Humberto and Fernando Campana will receive the prestigious Designer of the Year Award at this year’s Design Miami, reports Dexigner. “We are thrilled to be able to give the Designer of the Year Award to the Campana brothers, who have made such a significant contribution to contemporary mass-manufactured as well as limited-edition design,” notes Ambra Medda, Design Miami director. “Their joyful and exuberant work incorporates discarded and repurposed objects, numerous references to culture both sophisticated and street, and a loving yet frank social commentary on their native Brazil.” In keeping with Design Miami tradition, the Campana brothers will create an installation designed exclusively for the December show to be presented within the central courtyard of the fair’s new temporary structure designed by New York architects ArandaLasch. The installation, entitled Diamantina, will represent an evolution of their “TransPlastic” series, which was unveiled at Albion Gallery in London in 2007. Using the native Brazilian plant apuí, which grows on and eventually chokes rain-forest trees, TransPlastic designs feature this rattanlike fiber woven around ready-made plastic garden chairs and other plastic objects, such as discarded toys, dolls, flip-flops, and tires.
In other news, this year’s Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts goes to the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, notes e-flux. The Kiesler Prize is presented for extraordinary achievements in architecture and the arts that relate to Frederick Kiesler’s experimental, innovative attitudes and his theory of “correlated arts.” The international jury said that Ito is an architect “who has been focusing on fundamental questions of architecture with regard to their sociocultural modes of action for more than thirty years, without heed for prevalent fashions. Since the 1990s, Toyo Ito has been calling for the creation of a new relationship between architecture and the natural environment beyond the concepts of modernism.”
