Hollington Industrial Design

King and Miranda

How Zaha Hadid found acceptance
People have no problem acknowledging the talent of the Baghdad-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid, who shot to prominence in 1982 when she won an architectural competition for the Peak, a clubhouse spectacularly perched on the summit of Hong Kong’s main island. Their problem seems to be knowing what to do with it. read more

The fame game
Who won the Perrier-Jouët Selfridges Design Prize this year? Don’t know? Well, nobody did. Because the prize, inaugurated, ooh way back in 2001, no longer exists. Even the Selfridges press office had never heard of it. Sic transit gloria mundi. And so, despite other initiatives, British design still lacks its equivalent of the Booker and Turner prizes. It’s not for want of trying. read more

Part Garrison Keillor, part cyberbabe: an interview with Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson achieved celebrity rare for a performance artist in 1981 with the unlikely hit, O Superman. The eight-minute single chronicled life with her telephone-answering machine. The song was a fragment of a four-part work spread over two evenings, United States, a kind of multimedia version of Wagner's Ring Cycle, dealing not with love, money and redemption, but more modern American themes: democracy, (in)security, technology. read more

Tyrannies of technology and tradition: an interview with Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway is an exception among film-makers. His work provokes critics into revealing their cosy preference for all films to be essentially the same: they want dramatic stories told in banal dialogue between famous actors playing clear roles. Everything else becomes secondary to an idea of protagonists upon a stage that has not changed from the classical theatre. Greenaway sees different potentials in film, which he feels has been neglected as what it so obviously is—a visual medium. read more

How not to become a Unabomber: an interview with Terry Gilliam
All Gilliam’s films are about liberty. The recurrent themes of make-believe kingdoms and time travel are merely devices for exploring this concept. The incursions upon our liberty may be technological, bureaucratic, parental, governmental—or technological, because another Gilliam motif is the way technology diminishes human contact and the power the imagination. read more

The categorical denial of Simon Patterson
If it’s often the designer’s job to communicate a sense of an ordered world, then it’s surely the artist’s job to disrupt that order and expose its limitations. Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton toyed with comic books and familiar brand symbols, giving these mass-produced images the painter’s touch. For Simon Patterson—whose very email address is an anagram of his name—it is the message that is altered while the medium remains intact. One of his most ambitious works, and certainly his best loved, is The Great Bear, a comprehensive reworking of Harry Beck’s famous map of the London Underground. read more

An interview with Ron Arad is always a mildly unnerving affair
Twenty years ago, Ron Arad foresaw the demise of Rover. His prediction took the form of a chair which cannibalised the leather seat from a two-litre Rover and mounted it, with deliberate brutality, on a hulking half-moon steel frame. The Rover chair was briefly known to millions because it featured in one of those terribly style-conscious 1980s advertisements. read more