«Personification» section opens with the article Zang Tumb Tumb by Mikhail Karasik. Experts in the history of design will immediately recognize one of the forefathers of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: the article name is taken from the cover of one of his famous books. The publication is just in time — this year we are celebrating the centenary of Futurism! (Written in 2009).
«Personification» section continues with a large five-spread material devoted to Luba Lukova. Luba is a graphic designer in the US, with her works known worldwide. The editors could not fit the material in the planned three spreads — the works were so good! In addition, we didn’t want to cut the text written by Anna Kozhara, our contributor, as it was based on the interview with Luba. Finally, we had to postpone other publicationsthem for the sake of this unique material of ten pages.
The traditional column of Olga and Alexander Florensky «Russian Design» this time is dedicated to the project Humble architecture. With the humor and design-linguistic finesse, characteristic to the Florenskys, the authors publish projects of various structures from the Tower for having fireworks to Masts for maintaining the flag unfolded.
The articles of section «Lettering» as if coincide with each other. Their authors come to a kind of a dialogue on the pages of the magazine. Jerry Kelly, in continuation of his article about the type reconstructions (the beginning of the article was published in the previous issue) writes: «Inevitably, along with original modern types there will always be the reconstructions of the earlier classic ones, complementing the current type palette».
Ilya Ruderman, abundantly commenting his own works on the pages of the magazine, remarks: «As long as the visual language of communication uses symbols, they will require uniqueness. Even if the number of types will be equal to number of people on the planet — imagine each of us to have our own unique type — even in this case their owners will be getting mature, thus making types change».
Section «Object» opens with an article by Anna Balagurova «16 Animali». It is dedicated to the project of an Italian designer Enzo Mari. The set of sixteen animal figures is a wooden jigsaw, the design icon of the XX century, not only an art which came out of a toy, but also the embodiment of a long-term analytical research of Marie as a designer-theoretician. The object can be seen live at the «100 objects of Italian Design» exhibition in the Loft Project ETAGI.
Further on, among the items already mentioned, there’s an already permanent section, showing the most significant achievements of design from the Vitra collection. In this issue, read the story by Nina Filyuta about Vegetal chair by Bouroullec brothers.
The two publications for section «Environment» have been prepared by the editor-in-chief Mitya Kharshak on his own impressions from visiting Masters’ Houses in Dessau. The houses by Walter Gropius, for Bauhaus masters: Lionel Feininger and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, George Muche and Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky are now included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Read more about their past and present in the articles Master’s Houses and The Black Room.
«Photography» is dedicated to the wonderful St.Petersburg photographer Andrey Chezhin. Andrey has written the text about himself and his reliable camera Horizon, which helps him take magical and incomprehensible images.
In section «School», Sergey Helmyanov talks about his experience of supervising diploma projects: how the work was going on and what difficulties he faced in the graduation project of Nadezhda Stefanovic, presented at the Product Design Department at Stieglitz Academy.
Finally, here’s the section «Books». The expert on book history Mikhail Karasik talks about the ridiculous pages of the national book history of the 1930s in the publication «Wearing a gas-mask».