This week the Museum of Arts and Design opened their new show Totally Rad: Karim Rashid Does Radiators. A brilliant collection of industrial design that innovates form into functional whimsical sculptures. After the event, I immediately reconsidered my radiators and thought they could use a face-lift, and isn’t that the beauty of design?
Posted from AZURE on February 23, 2009 by Rachel Pulfer
Starting March 4th at the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle in New York City is Totally Rad. It’s an exhibition of, erm, hot new radiator designs, curated by His Blobbiness Karim Rashid, and including new work from the likes of Studio Dell’Acqua Bellavitis, Caleido and Rashid himself.
Totally Rad will be taking place in the MAD Museum’s new Design and Innovation Gallery, which will explore emerging trends in design through a series of short‐term exhibitions guest‐curated by leading voices in the field. (Readers, take note: that could mean you.)
“Typically, it takes some time before new work and fresh ideas make their way into museums. With this gallery, we’re able to explore emerging trends in design as they develop, which is a great complement to our permanent collection and our larger special exhibitions,” states Holly Hotchner, the Museum’s Nanette L. Laitman Director. “Totally Rad is the perfect show to inaugurate the space. Radiators are everyday objects that many people overlook, but here we can take the time and space to think about their new aesthetic potential.”
It’s excellent news that a design museum is planning to devote a gallery exclusively to contemporary work. However, the title of the inaugural exhibition, Totally Rad: Karim Rashid Does Radiators, is not entirely accurate, in that most of the designs are by other people. (Rashid’s contribution, Klobs, designed for Hellos in 2006, is a series of blobby forms in aluminum that project from a single central pipe.)
That said, Rashid’s selection is predictably excellent, with Bambu, a particularly elegant project from Studio Dell’Aqua Beliavitis that replicates a grove of bamboo, and another from Claudio Colucci, entitled Puzzle, that riffs off op art motifs with a series of coloured panels attached to a central pipe. Also going for the graphic look is Caleido, whose Rain and Honey radiators in steel and acrylic wouldn’t look out of place on the set of a James Bond film from the Sean Connery era.
Definitely worth a look if you’re passing through NYC, Totally Rad runs through May 17.
