Abstract the Art of Design Season 1 Episode 1 Transcript

Forget Woody Allen (if you lot haven't already), illustrator Christoph Niemann is here to represent the urban neurotic creative. With pictures! Niemann is one of viii subjects of the new Netflix documentary series Abstruse: The Art of Design, which premieres February 10.

Niemann'southward episode gives him the screen as his sketchbook to talk virtually his process, to play with Legos, to explain the very concept of abstraction via an blithe "Abstract-O-Meter." He feels less like a documentary subject than director Morgan Neville'southward collaborator (or maybe hijacker), willing himself into and out of situations as a grown-upwards Harold with a imperial crayon.

Abstract brings newfangled engineering to the age-old task of explaining what designers practise. It's delightful to see so much money thrown at people who, almost unanimously, call up all-time with a pen and a pad of paper.

At its all-time, Abstract illustrates that work through building tours, crits, and portrait sessions, augmenting everyday reality with animation and digital transformations, making designers into activeness figures and superheroes. At its worst, information technology swamps the screen with imagery, trusting usa to be impressed without offering criticism or context for the subjects' glossy portfolios.

The shadow of magazine publisher Conde Nast hangs over the whole project. Scott Dadich, the series' creator and executive producer with Neville and Radical Media's Dave O'Connor, was until recently the creative director and editor in chief of Wired.

In an editor's note in the Feb 2017 issue he writes that the show "isn't Wired on Netflix," but in the Bjarke Ingels episode, at least, Abstract shows Ingels's 2015 Wired characteristic and interviews Andrew Rice, the author thereof. Niemann draws for the New Yorker (besides every bit the New York Times, Instagram, the App Store, the world), the lensman Platon makes pictures for the New Yorker, set up designer Es Devlin and architect Ingels accept both received the total New Yorker profile treatment.

The merely talent I had not heard of before was Ralph Gilles, Head of Pattern for Fiat Chrysler, and the man we accept to give thanks for Chrysler's recent low-slung, snub-nose swagger. Gilles, equally a Canadian-American of Haitian descent, brings a minor quantity of racial diversity to a roster of designers that is, much like the design profession equally a whole, white and located along a Portland–New York–London–Berlin axis.

If I were Los Angeles, current upper-case letter of graphic, photogenic, and not bad interiors, I would be offended. The rut in interior design today is in the playground shapes of function landscapes, or in the gleeful branding of retail environments—nowhere to be seen in the absolute tastefulness of British designer Ilse Crawford'south segment. Surely the producers could have found a different adult female to illustrate a more of-the-moment take on interior comfort.

When budgeted such an charabanc project, I always count the women, and three is a comparatively proficient yield. The focus on individuals rather than partnerships remains problematic, though I appreciated the glimpses of the various designers' young teams, lit by the glow of their giant Apple monitors.

Abstruse uses exterior talking heads sparingly but these, as well, had a reasonable level of femaleness, a handful of people of color, a soupcon of new faces. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger and Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli are both excellent at talking nigh architecture and design, but they don't need to exist in every single show on those topics (balance assured, the as-dearest Pentagram partner Michael Bierut does appear in the graphic design episode).

Dadich's Wired editor'south note also offers a blanket critique of everyone else'due south pattern documentaries: "Most of it is clean, minimal, and boring as hell." Hear hear! (I doubtable Dadich may accept been thinking of the last blueprint documentary I saw, Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Hereafter, which fuzzily applied the template of Nathaniel Kahn's My Architect and ended up making a short, heady life dramatically inert.)

Christoph Niemann

Courtesy of Netflix

Abstract is equally uncritical and worshipful, just it is also fast and funny. The starting time thing that will strike you is how filled with color and motion information technology is. And that movement is not Ken Burns'due south deadening pan beyond a historic photograph. The camera rides in cars and drones up the sides of buildings, giving us a perpendicular view of the courtyard at Ingels's pyramidal VIA W 57 in Manhattan and the brilliant yellow mat at what I'thou guessing is Nike's pole vault exam track on its campus in Beaverton, Oregon. (The series is sparing with IDs.)

In Niemann'due south Berlin, we glimpse a stick-effigy version of the man himself cycling along the real street; in Devlin'south Rye, in East Sussex, England, she plays herself equally a child, sitting on the gabled rooftop of a model of her childhood home. The effects are delightful, developing, as they do, out of the designers' words. The illustrated slideshow one assumes is always playing in their minds is, here, brought out into the open up air.

When Nike designer Tinker Hatfield cites the Centre Pompidou museum, with its color-coded utilities hung on the exterior, as the inspiration behind the exposed technology of the Air Max sneaker, we cut immediately to Paris and Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers'southward rainbow behemoth. When Pentagram partner Paula Scher tells us she watches classic film while painting her detailed, infographic maps, we switch to divide screen, with Scher repeating dialogue in sync with other straightforward dames similar actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

Information technology'south big budget, it'southward anti-cornball, and, thanks to the filmmakers' embrace of greenscreens, the designers get to play glamorous versions of themselves. I've joked that in the 21st century you have to exist telegenic whatsoever you exercise—and here's proof. The best episodes of Abstract focus on people who don't need to be drawn out: they accept already processed their experience and lay it out, tick tick tick, for the audience. Information technology will undoubtedly serve as a primer for design's up-and-comers.

Scher takes us up to her archives and shows united states the behemothic book of American wood blazon specimens that launched her work for the Public Theater, and nosotros realize that the line of bold, paw-carved Rs, diminishing in width, expect like dynamic type long earlier Scher controversially used it for the New School's rebranding in 2015. Sadly Scher doesn't make that connexion and neither do the producers, though her segment, directed past Richard Press, does the best job of inserting history into a frame that wants everything to exist about right now.

She talks about married man Seymour Chwast and his pioneering work with Pushpin Studio, almost the disastrous Palm Embankment butterfly election, nigh the "dumb" 1976 Boston tape cover that she fears will exist the first matter mentioned in her obituary, and the episode animates her short tutorial on how the placement of the arm in an upper-case E tin can make it look automatically moderne. So much cognition, so fiddling fourth dimension, and a demonstration of the way generosity—Scher'south desire and willingness to talk about something other than herself—makes for a much more entertaining 40 minutes of television.

I have to admit, during several other episodes, my mind wandered at near the 20 minute mark. Why? Blame Twitter, my constant TV companion, but likewise the formulaic nature of the classic magazine profiles: Hither are our 3 minutes with the parents, brother, children. Hither is our example of early artistic promise.

Paula Scher

Courtesy of Netflix

A passive-vox "Ingels-has-been-criticized" moment illustrated by Bjarke'southward many, many mag covers undercuts the show's own nod toward critique by visually suggesting negative commentary might but be jealousy. Ingels and his talking heads offering lilliputian context for his success, repeatedly referring to his work as "revolutionary," stressing his youth. Ingels also refers, unchallenged, to architecture every bit "a field where there is almost zero innovation."

I believe Ingels learned from the verbal and visual provocations of Rem Koolhaas, for whom he so famously worked, and nonetheless no i mentions Koolhaas. The origin story is too perfect to complicate, but information technology means that the viewer doesn't learn virtually architecture, just this architect.

The shallowness becomes peculiarly apparent in the episode on car designer Ralph Gilles, who comes across as depression-key (though he is clearly an intense dominate and husband), but is less of a professional charmer than Ingels or Scher. Information technology's fascinating to see the teenage car sketches that first brought him to the attention of Chrysler. He tears upward, and takes a long pause, while reading the encouraging letter then-Chrysler design chief Grand. Neil Walling sent dorsum in response.

It's a perfect opening for a vroom-vroom visual history of car rendering, or a expect at Detroit'south most influential stylists, including the legendary Harley Earl. When Gilles's employees put tape on a life-size wooden model of a car, etching new lines in the air with their hands, they embrace the tradition of men similar Earl, just no i cares to tell us that.

Es Devlin's episode suffers from a different version of the aforementioned problem: She'southward charismatic to the nth degree, simply I didn't know anything most phase design earlier I watched it, and I don't know more now. We don't hear from clients or team members or directors, and nosotros are shown only the briefest clips of U2 concerts and Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hamlet, Kanye and Jay-Z facing off, and Beyonce taking center stage. The zippiness of the editing won't terminate to permit Devlin's piece of work exhale.

Maybe it was likewise much to hope for one of those stars to appear, but director Brian Oakes could have done more to help the viewer see her piece of work with our own eyes, rather than through monologue. Does she accept a storehouse of giant acrylic boxes somewhere? Who actually makes these things? I understood more re-reading Andrew O'Hagan'due south New Yorker profile of Devlin than I did seeing the snippets presented past Abstruse.

Platon

Courtesy of Netflix

The most moving episode by far is the i devoted to portrait lensman Platon Antoniou, besides directed past Press. From his first voiceover, Platon (who generally goes past first proper noun only) makes the argument for photography as an abstract art, controlled, composed, and structured similar a religious icon. I practice believe all that, though I don't think that photography is actually blueprint.

Even so, Platon proves to be a wonderful guide through his own influences, his own biography, and his own work process. The combination of casualness and focus that allow him to connect, even for a single shutter click, with a world leader and an abused refugee, comes beyond from the first moments.

His episode benefits by having a through-line: The episode periodically returns to a photograph session at his studio with sometime Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell. We run across Platon making Powell comfortable, changing the properties, chatting him up in existent fourth dimension, and the episode ends with the powerful result.

The made-for-TV moment that will stay with me, though, is when he says to Powell, of the padded wooden box he's sitting on for the session, "Gaddafi sat on that box, and Putin." Powell jumps. And the professional is there, ready to capture the moment of unguarded truth.

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Source: https://archive.curbed.com/2017/2/10/14568550/netflix-abstract-art-of-design-review

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