Time Sensitive28 Kesä 2023

Tom Dixon on Designing With Longevity in Mind

The renegade British designer Tom Dixon has long had a roving obsession with raw materials—everything from cast iron, steel, and copper; to clay, glass, and stone; to felt, plastic, and marble; to, more recently, cork and aluminum. Entirely self-trained and without any formal design education, Dixon emerged in the design sphere in the 1980s by creating unusual welded salvage furniture that was at once antique, experimental, beautiful, and punk in spirit. Never short of bold, forward-looking ideas, Dixon works from a materials-first perspective. Over the years, he has created an industrial chair with upholstery inspired by the rubber inner tubing of car tires, furniture made of flame-cut steel, and even conceptual pieces grown underwater and built of Biorock. Central to all that he does is a quest for longevity and, in turn, sustainability; he has even, in the past, toyed with the idea of a thousand-year guarantee.

On the episode, Dixon talks about how two motorbike accidents transformed his life, his days in the early 1980s as a bass player in the disco-funk band Funkapolitan, why he considers cork a “wonder material,” and the parallels he sees between his design creations and those of a baker.

Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.

Show notes:

[00:56] Tom Dixon

[07:02] Flame-Cut Furniture

[11:27] Design Miami

[12:06] Craig Robins

[13:50] Wolf Hilbertz

[31:14] S-Chair

[34:41] Giulio Cappellini

[35:12] Marc Newson

[35:15] Jasper Morrison

[38:56] Isamu Noguchi

[38:56] Akari Light Sculptures

[39:57] Constantin Brâncuși

[40:33] Dixonary

[46:34] Funkapolitan

[49:16] Funkapolitan’s “If Only”

[49:17] Funkapolitan’s “In the Crime of Life”

[50:17] August Darnell

[53:56] Guy Pratt

[53:58] Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt

[54:50] Creative Salvage

[01:01:06] IKEA

[01:03:37] Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

[01:03:50] Enzo Mari

[01:03:51] Achille Castiglioni

[01:03:52] Verner Panton

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(160)

Dries Van Noten on the Meaning Found in Making

Dries Van Noten’s lifelong fascination with craft and making runs deep. He grew up in a multigenerational family of retailers and tailors in Antwerp, and in the 1980s, he was part of the famed avant-g...

24 Kesä 59min

Felix Burrichter on Print’s Enduring Power in the Algorithmic Age

Through PIN–UP, the German-born, New York–based editor, curator, and founder Felix Burrichter continues to expand the possibilities of what an architecture magazine can be. He constructs intuitive bri...

17 Kesä 1h 20min

Maria Popova on the Role of Chance in Shaping Our Lives

Through her multifaceted work, the Bulgarian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, reader, and researcher Maria Popova, founder of the “free, ad-free, A.I.-free, fully human” website and newsletter The Margina...

10 Kesä 58min

Sheila Hicks on Life as a Series of Portals

For our latest “site-specific” episode of Time Sensitive, Spencer meets Sheila Hicks inside her courtyard in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, where she has called home for more than 60 yea...

27 Touko 1h 4min

Valerie June on Joy as a Form of Resistance

The singer-songwriter Valerie June has a gift for writing contemporary songs that feel timeless and as though they could also have existed at various points across the past century. Her expansive laye...

13 Touko 1h 13min

George Saunders on the Power of Fiction to Enliven the World

The novelist, essayist, and short-story writer George Saunders—widely celebrated for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), which won the Man Booker Prize, and book of short stories Tenth of December ...

6 Touko 1h 11min

Alma Allen on Connecting to the Primordial Through Art

There’s an animate quality to the biomorphic sculptures of the self-taught, Utah-born artist Alma Allen. His works, carved from wood, marble, and bronze—and informed by his deep appreciation for the n...

22 Huhti 1h 6min

Devon Turnbull on Elevating the Beauty of Sound

To be in a room with one of the artist and audiophile Devon Turnbull’s texture-rich Ojas hi-fi audio systems may be the closest one can get to being in the studio with the musicians themselves. It’s n...

8 Huhti 1h 4min