The Rashid machine

Chances are, you’ve never heard of Karim Rashid. Unless you happen to be an architect or a designer, that name probably wouldn’t mean anything to you. But chances are, you’ve already used at least one of the over 2,000 products he’s designed. If you’ve had a drink at Nuvo’s outdoor terrace, you’ve already sat in one of his Oh chairs. You’d probably recognize one of his sexy plastic Garbo trash bins for Umbra. Taking something as ordinary as a trash bin and transforming it into a beautiful object is typical of the brilliance of this immensely talented designer. Over the last two decades, he’s accumulated dozens of awards while museums such as the SFMOMA, the Chicago Atheneum and the Brooklyn Museum have made his work part of their permanent collections. Karim Rashid was chosen by the Chamber of Furniture Industries of the Philippines to be the first guest lecturer of Manila Now, a series of lectures by the world’s leading designers. I had a chance to interview Rashid before his lecture and got to learn more about the man in white.

Born in Cairo to an Egyptian father and English mother, Rashid began life as a nomad. His family lived in Algeria, Italy, and England, until finally settling in Canada. After studying Industrial Design in Toronto, Rashid immersed himself in Milan’s design nexus and worked at a leading design studio there. After another stint at a design studio in Toronto, he established his current studio in New York. The world began to take notice of Rashid about eight years ago, when he was part of a design movement that put forth what’s come to be known as Blobitecture or the architecture of blobs, those organic, amorphous shapes that have now become a part of popular culture. Back then, when people were yet unfamiliar with this style, Rashid used the phrase sensualism to try to describe his particular brand of formmaking.

When asked about it, he tells me, "Sensualism is about creating objects that are friendlier and more human. I use forms that have more to do with our bodies and with nature than objects of the past that use purely straight lines. There are no straight lines on our bodies, no straight lines in this world, or in the universe." Rashid also talks about the emotional response that certain forms make. You can’t deny that his Garbo trash bin has an emotional resonance that a plain cylinder doesn’t have.

Rashid makes a clear distinction between style and design as processes. On one hand, he uses the example of a fashion designer who creates a collection that is inspired by the past. "For one collection, a fashion designer may take the clothing of peasants from a time period like the 1920s for example and recreate a contemporary version of that. "Design, on the other hand, is creating in the first order. When I design a cup, I have certain criteria that I set out when designing it. What form should the cup take? What materials are available today to make it? What can I do so that the temperature of the liquid is maintained but my hand is comfortable? The reverse of that is just creating a cup that looks like a baroque cup and it becomes of the baroque style."

Rashid further defines design not merely as a form of self-expression, but as a confluence of engineering, marketing and management. He’s the first to admit his role as a propagandist, which he credits to learning from the Italians, who are the masters of marketing propaganda. Like his precursor Philippe Starck, Rashid has conquered the world by manipulating the media like a master conductor. He’s appeared in over 200 magazines and books in the last two years. There are thousands of talented designers throughout the world but in the age of media overload and hyperconsumerism, it takes a marketing genius like Rashid to be distinguished from the multitudes vying for our attention.

During his lecture, Rashid boldly took on his role as a futurist. He shocked the audience by warning about the imminent death of craft-based production in front of hundreds of craft-based designers and manufacturers in the audience. An immediate shift to industrial processes and machinery is the path to the future. He cited the automotive industry as an example: "Look at the British cars of the last 30 years. They’re crap. The Japanese created robotics to build their cars and took over the entire industry." This is bad news to the hundreds of thousands of people in the furniture industry who rely on craftsmen to produce highly work-intensive products that are large, bulky and therefore expensive to transport. But perhaps this bad news is what we need to hear to realize the realities of global competition. We need to hear these things and we need to hear them from people who know what they’re talking about. Kudos to the CFIP for initiating this lecture series and creating a connection between the furniture industry and the global market. We’ve historically been good at starting revolution; perhaps this can begin a design revolution. Let’s get it started.

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Karim Rashid will be collaborating with 12 Filipino designers and the work will be presented at the annual Philippine International Furniture Show from February 27 to March 2, 2006 at the World Trade Center in Manila. Visit www.pifshow.com for more details.

E-mail the author at chut@archipelago.com