Between Pop and High-Tech

His designs are a mixture of pop and high-tech. They are original, often extravagant, sometimes extreme. The opulent exhibition of Marc Newson’s work from the last 40 years shows why the Australian is so famous and what industrial design means at the highest level.

Review by Thomas Wagner

Chairs, loungers, restaurants, bars, aeroplanes and spacecraft, boats and mega-yachts, watches, drinking glasses, jackets and shoes, bathtubs and taps, glasses, kettles, cameras and binoculars, fountain pens and much more – there is hardly a design task that Marc Newson has not solved in a unique way over the past 40 years, whether as a mass product, a one-off or a limited edition. Ever since Newson began experimenting with aluminium sheet and biomorphic forms in the 1980s, he has taken industrial design by storm. With “Marc Newson. Works 84 – 24′, Taschen Verlag has produced an excellent catalogue raisonné that will astonish anyone interested in design processes. This is not just an overview of 40 years of creativity, but a lavishly illustrated and instructive panorama of design that is second to none.

There is no doubt that Marc Newson changed the way we look at certain things with his often groundbreaking designs and, with his versatility and, above all, his will for precision, raised industrial design to a new level – comparable only to greats like Raymond Loewy or the Eames. Newson, again an exception, is the only industrial designer represented by Gagosian and the kreo gallery. Leading museums around the world have devoted retrospectives to him, and his projects are in the permanent collections of more than 40 institutions worldwide.

Illustrations from the book “Marc Newson. Works 84-24”, Taschen Editorial, Cologne 2024

Things Speak for Themselves

Cataloguing an artist’s works is generally considered to be a difficult task. The book ‘Marc Newson. Works 84 – 24’ is an inspiring volume. It does not preach anything. Nor are any half-baked ideas put into practice. This book is about original and consistent design – and the discipline of industrial design. Anyone who, after reading this book, still believes that the future of design is limited to black boxes with screens (or strange glasses) and the software to run them, in order to escape into a kitschy consumer world designed by programmers, is either mistaken or believes in fairy tales from Silicon Valley. Even if you just leaf through the book, you won’t stop being amazed. Not just at the breadth and range of Newson’s work, but at the astonishing originality with which he was able to solve supposedly exhausted design problems.

Learning to Build Things

It was probably no coincidence that Marc Newson, born in Sydney on 20 October 1963, studied jewellery design and sculpture at the Sydney College of the Arts from 1982 to 1984. He wanted to learn “how to make things”. His first pieces, a series of bracelets, were said to be the result of his “love affair with the Myford Super 7 lathe”. The bracelets were made from aluminium, which was to become Newson’s material of choice. In his third year he began work on the ‘LC1’ recamière, a kind of prototype for the ‘Lockheed Lounge’, which two years later established his legendary reputation as an industrial designer. Asked to make six chairs for an exhibition called ‘Seating for Six’, he imagined them as a curving organic shape reminiscent of a mercury stain. After unsuccessful attempts with a metal skeleton, he turned to techniques used to make surfboards. By making the mould out of foam and curing it with fibreglass, he obtained a self-supporting, stable core to which he could apply the metal finish. Rather than using glue, Newson opted for the more ‘honest’ technique of visible rivets, which gave the object the handmade feel that Newson prefers. Piece by piece, he hammers each sheet to size on a leather bag (a typical silversmith’s technique), then adjusts, cuts, files, drills and rivets it into shape. The result is a “very retro aeroplane look, like an old DC3”. The piece was meant to be aerodynamic from the start, and “the rivets made it scream a lot more than I ever imagined”. The LC1 is vaguely reminiscent of the chaise longue on which Madame Récamier rests in Jacques-Louis David’s 1800 portrait.

The Legendary Lockheed Lounge

The desire to create another piece using the same process gave rise to the legendary “Lockheed Lounge”. Newson wanted to address two issues: “Firstly, the LC1 felt too ‘derivative and postmodern’, and secondly, the form was not as ambiguous or fluid as he had intended. In addition, the Lockheed Lounge was not intended to be a stand-alone object, but to be produced in an edition of several copies. The first copy did not sell immediately, but it received widespread attention in the press. In the years that followed, the Lockheed Lounge’s popularity grew until it became an icon that, in retrospect, is “closely linked to the paradigm shift that occurred in the late 1980s with the emergence of the design art phenomenon”. (In 2006, it achieved the highest price ever paid for a work by a living designer; in 2015, it broke its own record, selling for $3.7 million).

Strongly inspired by surfing, Newson’s “Embryo Chair” combines injection-moulded polyurethane foam, a colourful neoprene coating and an internal steel frame. The result is a characteristic mix of organic shapes, warm materials and high-tech elements, such as the chair’s continuous steel legs. “Some of the characteristics of that chair,” says Newson, “set the DNA for a lot of what I would do after that. It’s probably one of the most recognisable things I’ve done, and one of the first pieces that was really well resolved aesthetically.

Things That Reflect the Spirit of the Times

What Newson achieved from the late 1980s to the present was not only original, often extravagant, it was pop. But not only that. The bold, colourful product aesthetic of pop has always been married to the cool, metallic surfaces of machine technology. Shifting the focus a little, one could say that Newson’s formal language constantly mixes and recombines organoid sculptural and technoid elements with historical references.

Without becoming eclectic, Newson has always managed to find innovative solutions and design things that reflect the spirit of the times, whether it’s the interiors of restaurants, first class lounges for the Australian airline Qantas, etc., the legendary “021C concept car” for Ford (“A car that dares to completely rethink how the design of a car can enhance the user experience”) or the bizarre and fascinating design of the “Kelvin 40” concept aircraft for the Fondation Cartier. Newson’s designs go beyond the usual norm, including the mega-yachts ‘Solaris’ and ‘Nausicaä’.

There are many more projects to come. One thing is certain: This book is not only an aesthetic treat for any designer, but also a great source of inspiration. On every page and with every object described in an instructive way, it becomes clear what Newson was thinking, how he went about it, what he liked – and what difficulties he encountered. In short, there is an infinite amount to be learnt from Newson about design, the power of ideas, the endless effort of realisation and the joy of success.

Marc Newson. Works 84-24

Cologne, Taschen Editorial, 2024

496 pages, numerous illustrations

Edition: English

ISBN 978-3-8365-7101-2

150.00 euros