This weekend in Philadelphia was all about Dutch design star, Marcel Wanders, in town to accept the 2009 Design Excellence Award from Collab, the group of design professionals associated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art who are steadily growing its modern design collection. They’re also raising the city’s design profile by bringing another icon each year to Philadelphia to accept this award (previous years’ recipients include Frank Gehry, Ingo Maurer, Florence Knoll Bassett, and Georg Jensen) and to be the subject of an accompanying exhibit.
This year’s exhibit, Marcel Wanders: Daydreams, is extra special because it’s the designer’s first solo show in the U.S. Daydreams opened this weekend in the Collab Gallery at the Perelman Building, and it runs through June. GO SEE IT.
You’ll enter the Collab Gallery through tall double curtains illustrated with the above image (Wanders wearing his “Nose” necklace) on a black background. It’s a fitting entry, because the room feels like a funhouse, a verifiable playground for design junkies. When I interviewed Wanders for the New York Times’ design blog, he said he hopes the exhibit will also serve as an introduction to his work for the unaffiliated. He’s been designing for 20 years, and, as he told the crowd assembled Saturday night for his lecture and to see him receive his award, he plans to design for another 35.
{This picture is from Milan Design Week 2007, not from the Philadelphia exhibit.}
Wanders and his studio have been working with the Museum for a year on a highly choreographed installation of audio, video, and lighting effects that turn on and off on cue so the environment in the 2,300 square foot gallery changes continually as you walk around. The largest piece might be the gigantic Calvin Lamp (pictured above) on a base as thick as a tree trunk. It’s so tall that the frilly underside of the lamp, like a demure giantess’s petticoat, is too high to touch on tiptoes. Wanders said during his lecture Saturday that he envisioned a lamp aside a baby’s crib that would make the baby feel protected. The lamp, he said, kept growing and growing.
In another corner, the famous Knotted Chair, in glinting gold, hangs from a giant balloon that alternates between being stark white and being a canvas for projected images of blue sky and clouds. Wanders told the group on Saturday this “mini-zeppelin” is a memorial for a friend who loved to fly and who died in a crash. There are many other pieces: his bathtub that looks like a giant, carved-out bar of soap; his tableware for KLM’s inflight service; the Snotty Vase; the Egg Vase; Wallflower, a new piece that even Wanders hadn’t seen before he’d arrived in Philadelphia last Thursday; and many more.
{Candlesticks from Wanders’ Holiday Collection for Target, now in stores.}
*p.s. The Perelman Store, the shop in the museum’s Perelman Building, is now chock full of Wanders designs, some of which I included in last week’s LifeStyle column:
{Click on the image to see it larger.}
