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Spectacle Makers: Thoughts on design from Daniel Weil

Daniel Weil’s studio is a living archive. One gets the sense that nothing within is a complete artefact, all adding up to an ever evolving gestalt. The sketchbooks lining the shelves date from 1978 to the present, each filled to every centimetre squared with drawings.

‘There are periods in which you're so taken with the task in hand that you sketch and sketch trying to solve something, your mind only operates in the material and the immediate iterative process. Those are the not so good moments. The good moments are when—instead of sketching—you draw. That means you're in the thought of a design process that is fluid. Now, when I put pencil to paper to design the drawing is an instruction to make or build. Drawing is thought made visible.’

Words and interview by

Henry Whaley

#Interviews

During a late meeting to finalise the design, Daniel paints the frame with TipEx to test the benefits of matting. 'An object can be finished yet the process never ends’.

The three-dimensional work to which those drawings relate can’t be easily categorised. Until recently, Daniel spent 28 years as partner at the world-leading design firm Pentagram, where his work included product ,furniture, interiors like the Swatch Timeship New York, United Airlines First and Business aeroplane seats, the World Chess Championship set and tables, the legacy pavilion for the London 2012 Olympics, and the lego effect CD case for the Pet Shop Boys’ Very.

‘For me, design is an open process that connects things, not only to follow prescriptions of good design. There is a limit to ‘form follows function’. It’s very reductive to think that design only follows industry and industrial processes in search of efficiency and effectiveness, this can lead us to an artless existence. Design can be reinvented every day.’

Daniel studied architecture in his native Buenos Aires, before moving to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where he was subsequently Professor of Industrial Design, and then a Senior Fellow. During the eighties, he produced many designs including his Bag Radio, in which the interior parts of a working radio were suspended in a pvc bag, showing the components and wires loosely arranged expressing the freedom of a new electronic technology, widely cited in the canon of postmodern design.

Invited by Ettore Sottsass, he was part of the Memphis Group for the 1982 collection, producing limited edition series of clocks made with fluorescent displays taken from cars, part of a lifelong fascination with time.

‘I’ve always been interested in time. In the late seventies I came to understand that time had been so essential in the cultural intellectual development of the 20th century. Time is the crucial component of relativity in demonstrating how unreliable the singularity of seeing something from one place is. How movement and viewpoints can change that in an instant. In this way the cubists found how to break figuration and still represent reality faithfully, in a filmic composite. You see all these different points and angles of the object in one picture. A picture of time. This thought opened for me a new territory in design.’

Clocks found themselves at the centre of the Design Museum’s exhibition of Daniel’s work, Time Machines, but they form a single strand of his thinking: ‘The term design has gone through so many iterations in practice and society, no other activity participates so many  changeable unlimited fields of application. Design can be everything and nothing.’

A small proportion of the sketches Daniel produced for the project, with a reproduction of The Horned Helmet IV.22, Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds.

Cubitts spectacle designer Ryan creating a 3D model of Daniel's design.

Collaborating with Cubitts presents the first time Daniel has designed spectacles. Like all his projects, his frame was the culmination of many strands of thinking about the essence of spectacles and their design. The starting point was a helmet made in Germany for Henry VIII, which features a pair of riveted spectacles.

‘In the Tudor period, glasses already in use were seen as sinister. This helmet is supposed to represent the devil, to strike fear in an opponent in battle. Glasses were seen as dark magic. It took a long time for mankind not to fear science. It’s nice to think that we have moved on.’

The final frame pairs crystal acetate with a hand riveted brass frontispiece, a marriage of the modernity and tradition in spectacle making. Like so many Daniel Weil projects, the object represents an idea in transition. Details are seized upon and rethought. Even in the final stages, the front was matted to better express the two elements.

‘An object can be finished yet the process never ends’.

One of Daniel's clocks, created in 1983 under the title '100 Objects: Mirrors of Silent Time'.