Marti Guixe's FoodBALL the FoodWOW shop is the most useful + agreeable restaurant design innovation since the table and chair. The idiosyncratically subversive Catalan former "ex designer's" project for Camper Shoes' first foray into food retailing - located in Barcelona, historical home to anti-Fascist Republican Front - is nothing short of revolutionary. In a master stroke Guixe has dispensed with both table and chair and internalized the popular and egalitarian public stair, creating an eating environment which lives up to the billing "brilliantly simple and curiously serious". Or, in the now ubiquitous tone of style magazines, "In is the new out".
Guixe describes the Camper FoodBall as,"a new way of eating food fast. 100% natural, 100% fresh, handmade, bio, organic, and full of ideology". The techno-gastrosof and tapaist next takes his staircase-as-restaurant concept for Camper to the German capital. First he takes Barcelona, then he takes Berlin...
In the often vain, vapid and trend-obsessed world of major league design, Guixe has consistently turned out singular and inspired, humanistic works. I first discovered the "mandorla" (a kind of aura, which I'm told is addictive) resulting from his "unconventional gaze" on the opening day of the Milan Salone back in 1999. For those unfamiliar, the Milan event each April is the undisputed Mecca for international design where the most talented designers from around the world typically display their most significant work. That spring Guixe stole the show with a most unlikely fashion store design, also for Camper Shoes, on Milan's Via Montanapoleone. On this most glamourous of Vias, Guixe placed stacks of shoe boxes in the middle of the room and erected temporary, decidedly unglamourous walls, on which these same talented designers and other visitors were requested to write - in "Camper red" pen - their suggestions of ways to improve the world.
Other projects, too numerable to mention, have subtly affected perception in the wider culture, though for the most part imperceptibly. In Munich, Guixe's design for Camper, situated within a Herzog + De Meuron designed building, playfully challenges and, in a sense, overshadows the work of the famous Swiss firm - who were working with an infinitely larger budget. Guixe's "Meeting Place" design effectively fills the void of urban landmark and gathering space which has been neglected by city planners - using iconography of airport hazard signage.
All of which is leading me to a simple and curiously serious idea of my own. Herzog + de Meuron have been given a massive budget to create a monumental sports stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. If the International Olympic Committee wants to prove its relevance and that it relates to the ethos of this age, it should let its professed humanist and egalitarian ideals take built form. Rather than sponsor another predictably impressive building it should do something really radical - award Herzog + De Meuron's 400 million Euro Beijing Olympic Stadium instead to Marti Guixe. At least we know he's been collecting ways to improve the world. Vive la revolucion!
see also:
metro-obsessives: help is at hand
marti guixe - 1:1 - food design
u+a design award - japanese toilet
absurbanists - london based fat ltd is hired to make dutch "new town" hoogvliet cool
endotecture - japanese architect shuhei endo
defying definition - s333 architects - expatriate architects based in amsterdam
s333 - construction photos - vijfhuisen and groningen, holland
right angles - s333 architects' inventive project in vijfhuisen, holland
cross border cowboys - l.a./berlin based architecture firm graft
the coolest trailer in the park - lwpac architects' house of the future