Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Grand vision

Launched only three years ago, the Design September festival in Brussels is already attracting some of the planet’s foremost creative minds. Nina Lamparski discovers that the fine line between art and design is no more

Citiscape structure If you’ve recently taken a stroll along Avenue de la Toison d’Or in Brussels, you’re bound to have spotted a gigantic wooden sculpture resembling a mushroom cap built from oversized matchsticks.

Located on one of the capital’s most prestigious shopping strips, the 18m-high and 40m-long structure known as Cityscape sticks out like an alien spaceship amid the fancy designer boutiques and department stores.

The outlandish monument, which was erected last September and will remain in place until October, is the brainchild of Belgian-born Arne Quinze, globally known as the ‘bad boy of the design industry’.

Once a homeless teenager who sprayed Brussels walls in graffiti and hung out with motorcycle gangs, the 37-year old co-founder of international furniture label Quinze & Milan has since conquered art and interior design aficionados in Paris, London and New York.

More importantly, Quinze has helped catapult his birth town onto the world stage of architecture and interior design as a serious force to be reckoned with. He even rejected an offer from Berlin for the Cityscape project, instead opting to build it in Brussels as part of last year’s Design September. The annual festival, launched in 2006 within the framework of the Fashion and Design year, was established to shed the EU bastion’s drab image as a place stuck in an Art Deco time warp.

“Both Berlin and Brussels wanted a Cityscape. I decided to follow my heart,” Quinzes explains. “I lived ten years in this city and spent six months homeless on the streets. Returning to Brussels after twenty years [spent abroad] made me conclude that it is one of the few cities in Europe that doesn’t grow nor modernise much, and certainly not for the better. If you look at what happened to Paris or London, or even much smaller cities such as Lille or Rotterdam: things are fast changing while Brussels seems to have fallen asleep.”

The main goal behind Cityscape was to spark off “interaction, openness and dynamics”, according to the self-confessed “supporter of chaos”.

Bad boy of Belgian
design Arne Quinze
is responsible for the
alien-looking
Citiscape structure“The sculpture is about a frozen moment that captures and synthesises the movement and speed of this hectic neighbourhood,” he says.

The media frenzy that surrounded last year’s inauguration of Cityscape has certainly shaken things up a fair bit in sleepy Brussels, shining a mighty spotlight on both the ‘bad boy’ himself and the Design September festival.

Although the 2008 edition will have to do without Quinze’s trailblazing presence (he’s taking a break after being busy working on a project for the Olympic Games in Beijing), the event promises to be a huge success. For Director Marie Pok, the interest from local and foreign designers has noticeably grown compared to when the festival first started.

“It’s become easier and easier to program and organise,” she explained in an interview with a local newspaper.

“For the first two years I had to chase after people, now they are coming to us. I can already see that next year we will be able to go a lot further, and become more international.”

5.5 Designers Canape Bac; All aspects of design– from object and lighting, to graphic, food and landscape– will be covered when the three-week-long creative smorgasbord kicks off on September 7. Numerous designers, commercial brands, associations and institutions will display, discuss and promote their works in exhibitions, conferences, film projections, debates, flea markets, and pecha kucha nights. In addition, 15 restaurants will present guests with culinary creations all centred around the theme of chocolate. Last but not least, two of Brussels’ deluxe design hotels, the Dominican and the White Hotel, have also joined forces and will host a number of shows.

Name droppers are set to get their money’s worth, given the number of world-renowned creators partaking in the festival. Celebrities include the French Bouroullec brothers who regularly collaborate with Issey Miyake, Ligne Roset and Habitat; Italian legend and MOMA exhibitor Alberto Meda, the design genius behind super brands such as Alfa Romeo Auto and Alessi; and the irreverent shooting star of the Dutch style scene, Maarten Baas.

Danny Venlet’s
douche Viteo The absolute highlight of the programme is without doubt the lecture by Ron Arad, one of the planet’s foremost architects and design artists. Originally from Israel, Arad now heads the Design Products Department at London’s Royal College of Art. Among his most famous inventions is a pair of high-tech chandeliers designed for the Swarovski crystal company in 2005. Arad incorporated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into one of the chandeliers, which let people send SMS text messages to the lustres via a phone number. In Arad’s opinion, “there is no line between art and design. There are artists who dismiss things as design, designers who dismiss things as art”.

Arad’s view joins Quinze’s ideals of “interaction, openness and dynamics”, and sums up the essence of Design September: modernity is no longer about isolated individualism. With this festival we’ve entered a high-tech era celebrating the fusion of minds, styles and visions. www.designseptember.be

Event highlights

- September 10-28 Dynamo Belgian Young Design Awards The works of shortlisted candidates for the prestigious award will be on display at the 1950s Congress station, and the winner announced at the end of the exhibition.

- September 12-26 Gre3n Design Young designers from Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands will show creations inspired by the eco mantra ‘reduce, reuse, and recycle’.

- September 14 Brussels Design Market Fans of 1940s-80s design should arrive early at this market, which specialises in furniture, lighting and decoration objects from Belgium, Scandinavia, Italy, France and Germany.

- September 20 Pecha Kucha Twenty speakers show 20 slides and have 20 seconds to discuss the object shown at one of the festival’s funniest creative forums. Stick around for the after-party.

- September 23 Commerce Design Brussels Held in collaboration with the launch of the Competition for the Brussels Commerce Design Award, this international colloquium is for professionals and puts the accent on creativity and innovation in the design of commercial spaces.

- September 27-28 Designers Open Doors More than 50 designers and architects will open their workshops to the general public. A definite must.

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