Photo courtesy of designmiami.com

German designer Konstantin Grcic has been selected as this year’s recipient of the Design Miami/Designer of the Year Award. New work commissioned for the fair, along with an exhibition of highlights from Grcic’s career, curated by Grcic himself, will be presented at the December 2010 edition of Design Miami.
Each December, the Design Miami/ Designer of the Year Award recognizes an internationally renowned designer or studio whose body of work demonstrates unmatched quality, innovation, and influence, while expanding the boundaries of design. The Designer of the Year must demonstrate a consistent history of outstanding work, along with a significant new project, career milestone, or other noteworthy achievement within the previous twelve months. Past Designer of the Year winners include Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, Tokujin Yoshioka, the Campana Brothers, and Maarten Baas.
The Munich-based Grcic is not only one of the world’s most influential designers, but his disciplined, architectural, and boundary expanding approach to industrial design continues to set his work apart from his contemporaries. Founded in 1991,
Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design (KGID) has worked in fields ranging from furniture and product design to exhibition design and architecture-related commissions. Grcic’s products have received awards including the Compasso d’Oro (for the MAYDAY lamp in 2001) and are part of the permanent collections of worldrenowned institutions including The Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Throughout his career, Grcic has designed for companies including Cappellini, Established & Sons, Flos, Iittala, Krups, Magis, Moroso, Muji, and Vitra, among others.
In keeping with Design Miami/ tradition, Grcic has created an installation for this year’s fair. His piece, entitled Netscape will be presented in an outdoor area in the courtyard of Design Miami/’s Temporary Structure designed by New York-based design studio Moorhead & Moorhead. Given flexible boundaries for the commission by Design Miami/, Grcic chose to create a functional work that visitors to the fair will be able to interact with directly. Playing off this year’s tent design, Grcic created a six-point star-shaped structure from which seats made of netting will be suspended. The hanging chairs will rock slightly when used by visitors and will create a space for guests to engage with one another before entering or leaving the fair. Netscape will seat 24 people at a time.
“When I first looked at the design for this year’s Temporary Structure, there was this beautiful part of the tent, just before the entrance,” says Konstantin Grcic. “I knew that I wanted to create something special for the fair—something functional, but also something that incorporated my ideas of what a place like Miami is like in December. The idea for the commission was fairly immediate because the tent design by Moorhead & Moorhead really lent itself to a project like this. It’s a space for people to enjoy.”
In conjunction with Netscape, a small exhibition of Grcic’s work will also be on display inside the fair, near the show’s entrance for Design Talks, the forum for exploring contemporary design practice and collecting. The works in the exhibition, chosen by Grcic himself, will include his favorites, along with seminal pieces from throughout his career. Among the designs on display will be the Blow Table for Established & Sons (2010), the Miura Bar Stool for Plank (2005), and the Tip Waste Bin for Authentics (2003), among others. The fifteen works in the exhibition will be placed on readymade modeling stands placed in front of large-scale digital images taken in Grcic’s studio.
For more information refer to: designmiamiblog.com/ or www.designmiami.com

Published 28.10.2010