For Design Miami/ Basel, all were asked to present a "Conversation Piece"—a project to stimulate conversation and dialogue between people from different countries and cultures with the aim of giving visitors an unexpected gift through human contact—produced by the continuous crossover of design with the rest of the world.
Asif Khan, a young English architect, honored by MoMA and profiled in the New York Times as one of five designers to watch this year, presents "Cloud," a machine that creates airborne volumes of soap bubbles. The foam inside rises slowly upward, deforming like a cloud to be caught in fish net stretched across the ceiling, from which a light rain begins to fall after a few hours.
His work, which he likes to call "open," crosses many disciplines, from architecture to design to contemporary art. He fuses high and low tech, craftsmanship and design culture. For Khan, design should not impose a method, "because it is something that grows and each time, creates new situations and new contexts; it is therefore a way to enter fables and vice versa."
Whether designing an object like "cloud" or a building like the West Beach Café, Khan's signs are immersed within the same world that generates the infantile vertigo narrated by Twombly, or in which Mike Kelley's restlessness takes refuge. But when the British designer tells us about an architecture made of clouds or a bar whose windows are out of scale, we plunge into the dolls' house that inspired the project; its sophisticated lyricism, suspended between nostalgia and remembrance, pervaded by the lightness of rediscovered naivety, tuned into a frequency that can be heard directly by all, with no need for further explanation. "There was no need to explain that an electronic system calibrates the gas pressure so that the foam will rise into the air to look like clouds. People sit watching it entranced for hours; and also the fact that we are sitting here talking about it, even if on a different level, is still part of this project.
A project to stimulate conversation and dialogue between people from different countries and cultures with the aim of giving visitors an unexpected gift through human contact.
Pierfrancesco Cravel