Dezeen promotion: design brand Luminaire will present pieces by designers including Angelo Mangiarotti, Gruppo T and Konstantin Grcic at their Miami showroom 29 November - 11 December.

Top: Ad Memoriam.  Above: François Brument

Called transFORM, the show will also include work by Ad Memoriam, François Brument and Nao Tamura.

Above: Gruppo T

29 November  – 11 December, 2010
Luminaire Lab 3901 NE 2nd Avenue Miami

The information that follows is from Luminaire Lab:

THE LUMINAIRE LAB PRESENTS: transFORM
NOVEMBER 29 – DECEMBER 11, 2010

Luminaire Lab is pleased to announce the exhibition transFORM, an unparalleled installation that will dramatically convert the Design District’s showroom and secure the venue as an essential stop on every itinerary. During Art Basel Miami Beach and Design Miami, the Lab will showcase work created by designers who operate outside the confines of nationality and reject traditional archetypes in an exhibition that will be experimental and multi-sensory. Going beyond form to explore how various combinations of materials, movement and sound can serve as tools of communication, the exhibition will entice visitors to experience the unlimited possibilities of design and explore its potential to inspire investigation and discovery.

Above: Konstantin Grcic

The exhibition transFORM will feature extraordinary contributions by both established and up-and-coming international design visionaries. With a career spanning over 60 years, Angelo Mangiarotti can definitively be called a living legend, having designed everything from cutlery and clocks to lighting, furniture and buildings. In celebration of the collaborative re-edition of a new furniture collection by AgapeCasa and Studio Mangiarotti, Luminaire is honored to present the work of this iconic master, whose work consistently embodies a balance of rigorous study, purity of function and sculptural elegance.

Also from Italy will be limited-edition pieces by the avant-garde collective Gruppo T. Originally conceived in 1960 and now produced by Officina Alessi, these works eschew practicality, instead variously employing kinetics and optical effects to encourage interaction with the observer and to elicit an emotive response. Luminaire Lab will also highlight masters of contemporary design who are producing work that captivates the imagination and challenges our preconceived ideas about what design can be.

Above: Angelo Mangiarotti

Examining the idea of memory and its evocation through objects, the installation of the Ad Memoriam project will comprise six works by designers including, among others, Claudio Silvestrin, Giulio Gianturco and Luca Bonato. Incorporating diverse materials, these vessels are both intimate and delicate, revealing hidden secrets and encouraging reflection.

Utilizing sound and form in his work Vase#44, François Brument will harness vocal reverberations produced by the spoken word to create images. Exploring the principle of an infinite edition of unique pieces, Brument develops these patterns into vases employing digital 3D modeling techniques. Visitors to the Lab will have the opportunity to create personalized, one-of-a-kind designs, with the proceeds going towards Luminaire’s long-standing support of cancer research. Exploring the theme of the fragility of life, Japanese designer Nao Tamura will create a site-specific installation in the Lab’s front windows in which a translucent nest of filaments supports a display of Seasons, her silicone leaves, which can be used in a variety of ways, including to serve food and to wrap small objects.

Above: Nao Tamura

Additionally, Luminaire Lab is very pleased to host an exceptional installation of designs by Konstantin Grcic. Often referred to as a minimalist, Grcic prefers to invoke the word “simplicity” when describing his design aesthetic. With a range of work that defies easy catego- rization, Grcic has consistently sought to redefine and refine everyday objects, creating designs in both limited series as well as quotidian objects such as the KB720 blender for Krups.

transFORM
November 29 – December 11, 2010 Luminaire Lab 3901 NE 2nd Avenue Miami (Design District)

Open to the public
transFORM EVENT Thursday, December 2 6-9p Luminaire Lab
3901 NE 2nd Avenue Miami (Design District) Open to the public

ANGELO MANGIAROTTI

Angelo Mangiarotti’s inspirations were never limited to his home country. His extensive range of influences includes Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, whom he encountered while a guest professor at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1950s, to natural materials and essential, simplified lines drawn from traditional Japanese design.

Leading architecture studios in both Milan and Tokyo during his career, Mangiarotti also served as art director of glass manufacturer Colle Cristalleria and has held numerous visiting professorships at institutions including the Istituto Superiore di Disegno Industriale in Venice, the University of Hawaii, Switzerland’s École Politecnique Fédérale of Lausanne and in Australia, the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Institute of Technology. Additionally, he has been the recipient of numerous awards including the coveted Compasso d’Oro in 1994.

Italian manufacturer Agape has recently extended its range of action and widened its horizons of poetic awareness to encompass the entire home environment, offering its loyal and cultured customers a new brand, AgapeCasa. Featuring a new range of products for every room in the house, AgapeCasa proudly presents the “Mangiarotti Collection,” developed from original drawings and models and created in collaboration with the Man- giarotti Studio in Milan. Luminaire Lab is honored to offer this essential snapshot of a true design luminary.

GRUPPO T

In 1960, Milan’s Bruno Danese showroom hosted an historic exhibition of five works by Gruppo T, a consortium founded the previous year by Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi and Grazia Varisco. Fifty years later, this installation comes to Lumi- naire Lab, an environment exactly in line with the group’s experimental investigations into the boundaries of design. Emerging from the contemporary interest in kinetic and programmed art, Gruppo T referred to its work as mirio- rama (from the Greek roots myrio, meaning infinite, and orao, signifying sight), and sought to produce objects that could be created in multiples. Intended to purposefully engage the viewer in an interactive experience, visitors are encouraged to touch and manipulate these pieces, which variously employ moving parts and optical devices to inspire discovery and play. Thanks to the efforts of Officina Alessi, dedicated to the production of unique and sophisticated design objects, each of the five works is again available in a limited edition.

With a vast product line that includes everything from an iconic, whistling teakettle to a designer flyswatter, the Alessi company, founded in 1921 by Giovanni Alessi, has long been at the forefront of innovative and inspired product design. The company has created a dynasty out of not only offering products geared towards the main- stream – serving trays and everyday cutlery among them – but by also creating some of the most celebrated cult objects of our time.

AD MEMORIAM

Exploring the idea of an object as a monument, Ad Memoriam is a project in which contemporary artists and designers were asked to create a secret box in relationship to a personal memory. Luminaire Lab presents an installation of six of these works: Bowl Urn by Claudio Sil- vestrin, Inside by Ad Memoriam Studio, Mu by Andrea Anastasio, Nucleo by Elena Didonè, Soffio by Luca Bonato and Union by Giulio Gianturco. Employing diverse materials including Carrara marble, Limoges porcelain, ebonized wood, silver, aluminum, and glass, the results are strikingly different, yet each adheres to exploring quiet contemplation and its expression in the considered object.

FRANÇOIS BRUMENT

With a primary interest in the creation of objects existing in the interstice between numbered editions and industrial production, the work of free-lance French designer François Brument focuses on digital design and its application to form in perpetual change. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris, Brument has exhibited his work in France and abroad since 2005 including participating in the landmark show Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art (2008) and exhibitions at both the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (2009). He is represented in the permanent collec- tions of France’s Fonds National d’Art Contemporain and the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montreal, among others. Through the efforts of Nasir and Nargis Kassamali and with the generous support of 3D Systems, proceeds from the sale of works from this installation of Vase#44 will directly benefit cancer research and support in Miami, Florida.

NAO TAMURA

Emerging from the creative communities of both Tokyo and New York City, Nao Tamura approaches her work with a boundless sensibility. Tamura’s designs appeal to the emotions and refuse categorization, always evolving from her highly tuned aesthetic and sensitivity to nature and its temporal qualities. She has collaboratively worked with Issey Miyake, Nike, Aprica and KDDI among other companies.

Formerly a designer with Smart Design, Tamura currently runs her own studio, nownao inc. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Honorable Mention in I.D. Magazine’s Annual Design Review, Gold and Silver International Design Excellence Awards from Business- Week in Packaging and Graphic Design and Digital Media Interface, a Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum, and most recently, she garnered the top Salone Satellite Award at Milan’s 2010 Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

KONSTANTIN GRCIC

After training as a cabinetmaker at Parnham College in England, studying design at the Royal College of Art in London and apprenticing with Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic established his own design practice, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design (KGID) in Munich in 1991. He has developed furniture, products and lighting for some of Europe’s leading design companies such as Agape, Authentics, ClassiCon, Driade, Flos, Iittala, Krups, Lamy, Magis, Moormann and Moroso.

In a world saturated with objects and messages, Kon- stantin Grcic is unique for his ability to chart new territories, creating pieces widely described as pared down, simple and minimal. Constantly seeking to define function in human terms, Grcic combines maximum formal strictness with considerable mental acuity and humor, describing his own style as “current, feasible and realistic.”

Grcic’s contributions to design have widely been recognized. He has received many prestigious international design awards including the Compasso D’Oro in 2001. Grcic is also represented in the permanent collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pom- pidou, Paris and Die Neue Sammlung, Munich. The subject of a significant retrospective at The Art Institute of Chicago entitled Konstantin Grcic: Decisive Design (2009-2010), he was most recently named Design Miami’s 2010 Designer of the Year.

www.luminaire.com