The Ideal House installations have been a main feature of the Imm Cologne furniture fair since 2003, setting up two current stars of design or architecture to demonstrate their thoughts on domestic living. It’s an understandable ruse – every fair must have their audience-grabbing names and this year Zaha Hadid and Naoto Fukasawa were invited to design their Ideal Houses.
The results, although different in shape, were similar in content. Hadid and Fukasawa simply filled their given spaces with their own existing designs, showing mere mortals how a house could be furnished with limited edition furniture pieces (Hadid’s table for Established and Sons was the centrepiece of her contribution). In past editions of Ideal House, the installations were almost hidden away from the public: visitors had to go and find them amidst the vast amount of furniture on show. This year the two red and white installations sat triumphantly in the middle of a newly built avenue, which connects the new pavilions to the main pre-existing part of the fair.
Despite the prominent position, however, Hadid and Fukosawa missed an opportunity to produce anything exciting and new. The houses were kept pristine and very much ‘ideal’, as the visitors were kindly asked not to sit upon or touch any of the furniture on display. It does beg the question: how can Hadid say that her curvaceous installation is: ‘an expression of people’s growing awareness of the importance their surrounding holds for them’, when her look-but-don’t-touch Ideal House does not allow anyone to experience it?
One reason is that furniture design is increasingly perceived as a form of art, and the aesthetic experience has become more important than the functionality. In this instance it led, worryingly, to the designers completely forgetting about their users.Contemplating these two large constructions one wonders what the point can be of this type of exercise. Why don’t architects or designers of Hadid’s or Fukosawa’s calibre attempt to engage with their audience? Do architects and designers forget that aesthetic is not ‘the’ experience but one of its components?
A full report on Imm Cologne will appear in the April issue of Blueprint.
