Quote:
|
Originally Posted by BikerGoddess
Is there any way to view the article without signing up for a NYT online account? That feature really bugs me!
|
Sorry, I always forget that you have to do that with the NY Times. (Although if I had to sign up for any news site, the Times would be the one.)
March 16, 2008
Profile in Style: Philippe Starck
By Alix Browne
his design dna
Hotels, restaurants, juicers, furniture, foodstuffs, underwear ... you name it, Philippe Starck has designed it, improved it, given it more sex appeal. “It’s a dynasty built on creativity,” he says. Starck’s mother was a painter, and his father an aircraft engineer who once designed planes. “I love this photograph of me with Burt Rutan [the C.E.O. of Scaled Composites, an aerospace corporation] because he is like my spiritual father.” Even as he works on an average of 250 projects at any given moment, he still finds ways to spend time with his family. “I’m lucky,” he says, “because I get to travel with my wife.” Recently he got to work on the redesign of the Hotel Meurice in Paris with his daughter, the painter Ara Starck, after he unwittingly selected her anonymous submission for the ceiling of the hotel restaurant. “It was a good surprise,” he says.
his eco-mania
Starck may constantly circumnavigate the globe, but he unplugs whenever he can and turns into a homebody. Fortunately, this homebody has homes all over the world. “I never go out,” he insists. “We read a lot. We eat organic and vegetarian.” One home is on an island in Venice; another is an oyster farm in the south of France. “No cars, no electricity — we live with 200,000 oysters in the mud.” (Starck claims to have raised the world’s only cubic oysters.) His work with the Pramac energy group, meanwhile, has produced a design for windmills that also function as wind instruments. “Ecology is not just an urgency of the economy and protection of our world but also creativity and elegance,” he says.
STARCK TREK TO SEE A VIDEO ON PHILIPPE STARCK, GO TO NYTIMES.COM/TMAGAZINE.
his colorful character
“I don’t work, I dream,” Starck says. “And after, because my dreams are interesting, I have the luck to play with good partners.” This applies to matters of style as well. Not long ago, Starck purchased a trove of vibrant print fabrics in Africa and took them to Agnès b., where they were transformed into jackets, pants, even hats. He estimates that he now has over a dozen such mismatched ensembles. “I discovered one day that I was no longer interested in wearing black,” Starck explains. “It’s more fun to take risks, to be alive. Without risk, you don’t deserve to live.” Among his more flamboyant design risks was a series of gilded lamps modeled on guns for the Italian company Flos. “The lamp speaks about the collision between money and war,” he says. “In the end it is more about politics than design.”
his planes, trains and automobiles
When Starck says he’s “an explorer,” he’s not just talking about his pioneering imagination. He recently became the creative director for Virgin Galactic, which aims to fly people to the moon by 2009. One of his more relatively down-to-earth projects is a 118-meter mega-yacht — a high-tech, low-profile vessel that creates no wake, even at 25 knots. But what really gets his heart racing are motorcycles. “I have 25 motorbikes around the world,” boasts the designer, who created a super-stripped-down bike for Voxan. “It’s a pure product of the future.” And though he has designed an environmentally — not to mention financially — friendly car, he never drives one himself. “I can’t survive without my motorcycles — and maybe I will die on a motorcycle.”
Re: For all you MOB design-types
Linear Mode
