The combination of pro-bono design work, design with a social awareness message, and the launch of a brand, makes for a crowded platform. Efeito D (D-effect in English) aims to increase awareness of and raise funds for Down Syndrome children in Portugal. The Efeito D brand was launched with an exhibition affiliated with this year’s Experimenta Design Festival in Lisbon (EXD ‘09). The exhibition showcased objects designed by international designers aiming to use the concept of a defect as a positive and inspiring element within their design. That this is primarily a commercially viable brand is the premise and one that ultimately requires validation through commercial success. This premise applies significant pressure to the objects on display in a program that already treads on unsteady ground.

While I interpreted the theme as an invitation to explore notions of chance, variation and individuality, many works dwelt too long on the interpretation of defect as fault. I found it uncomfortable to see works that used a reduction of function as a response to the theme. Pedro Silva Dias’ (Portugal) work FAT Flash Drive is a large teak sphere housing a memory stick which is connected by an umbilical cable to a USB plug. The designer describes his work as ‘big, fat and heavy’. However beautifully executed it may be, the introduction of a product which struggles to remain functional is awkward for a brand that is directly related to a physical disability. Many other works are equally cringe worthy, choosing to infer that a defective object is a useless object.

A more sensitive design response is Martin Azua’s (Spain) Unusual Position. A corner has been shaved off the top backrest of a familiar wooden cafe stool, allowing the chair to be balanced on its end. Seemingly caught mid-spin, the design is simple and evocative. This work shows how a simple modification to a familiar object encourages new and unexpected opportunities to arise. Azua’s piece captured the perfect pitch for a program attempting to engage the viewer with its agenda.

While the collection of works succeeded to varying degrees in connecting with the theme and its association with Down Syndrome, the aspiration to launch this collection as a brand seems ill advised. At heart this is not a collection driven by commercial realities, and as such fails to culminate in either a compelling bespoke design collection or a viable commercial product. The possibility of a design brand raising money and awareness for a good cause is a compelling premise. I therefore hope to be proven wrong by the commercial success of Efeito D.

At a holiday lunch at the end of 2007 in St. Moritz, Switzerland, Ms. Westwater and her partner, Gian Enzo Sperone showed the architect pictures of the new gallery site, a lot they had just bought for $8.5 million. “We said: ‘Would you be interested in this? It’s much smaller than your other projects,’ ” Ms. Westwater recalled. “He took out paper and pencil and started sketching.”¹

Architect Lord Norman Foster doesn’t waste time with questions or considerations. Like a hound who has caught a scent, Foster immediately produces paper and pencil and begins sketching . It does not matter that he is in the middle of a presumably lavish lunch in St. Moritz with New York gallery director, Angela Westwater, and her partner Sperone. Aroused by pictures of the project, Foster begins sketching as if it is an involuntary action, as if possessed. His entire being becomes subservient to the will of his hand. There is no time to respond verbally to Westwater’s question, as a lesser mortal might do. Questions of function, context, cost and occupation can only interrupt the sacred creative flow.

In place of speech, he draws. In inspiration’s thrall, the architect becomes automaton. He draws immediately, obsessively, feverishly, masturbatorily. Describing a recent exhibition of his drawings, a short blurb on the website of Madrid’s Ivory Press gallery summarises Foster’s approach as “the dialogue between the eye and the hand via the pencil”. There is no room for thought in this equation. The eye sees, the hand makes, and the inert pencil, rather than the brain, is the messenger.

Popular culture frequently depicts the architect as an autistic savant, Rain Man in round glasses. Detailing Foster’s solution for the Sperone Westwater gallery , Robin Pogrebin’s recent NY Times article contributes to the myth. While Foster’s powers are prolific, his self control is not. Why not finish that foie gras, Norm? How about a sip of Chardonnay? Did your parents let you play with pencils at the table?

Paradoxically, Foster is also described as something of an Übermensch. He might be having lunch in St. Moritz, but Foster can instantaneously develop a proposal for a site he has yet to visit in Manhattan. We haven’t seen such rapid command of space since Superman last soared over the Atlantic. The implication is that it is the singular power of the master architect to somehow make the mental leap from an abstract, fragile sketch to the complexity and immensity of built space. Tall buildings in a single bound.

Foster’s design for the gallery’s Bowery site is as instructive as his table manners. “Sheathed in milled glass”, the exterior form of the building is little more than a cubic extrusion of a planning-code enforced setback to the street. The gallery interior will be characterised by the neutral white painted walls and polished concrete floors favoured by contemporary curators. A standard building then, with one exception: moving at a third the speed of a conventional mechanism, a giant elevator will act as the main gallery space. Up to 240 occupants will spend a prescribed time viewing works of art while travelling up or down. Velocity and compression, the bodily sensations caused by a typical elevator, are negated by the size and slowness of Foster’s device. Also negated are potential disjunctions between disparate spaces, which Koolhaas celebrated with the elevator in his Bordeaux House: in Foster’s gallery, all spaces are alike in their neutrality. Elevator as room and room as elevator, Foster’s pièce de résistance is a Dadaist relic, a familiar architectural party trick. Unlike his fellow savants, the architect has no extraordinary powers of recall. He is, in fact, an amnesiac.

While weekending recently in Montauk, at the Easternmost tip of New York’s Long Island, I chanced upon a listing for the house and studio of artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in nearby Springs, East Hampton. The Pollock-Krasner property is a National Historic Landmark, and is now owned by Stony Brook University, which runs tours of the house on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from May to October. Having seen the film Pollock, which chronicle’s the painter’s rise and subsequent demise , I had vague expectations of how the place would look. However I was not prepared for the revelatory experience of Pollock’s studio.

In 1946 Pollock relocated from his makeshift studio in a cramped upstairs room in the house, to the more spacious adjacent barn. He had recently begun to abandon the easel and paint directly onto canvas tacked to the floor. In the barn, the arcs and slashes which had become increasingly prevalent in Pollock’s work were liberated into full-body, paint-splattering gestures. No longer constrained, Pollock did not have to plan out his movements as deliberately as he had in the previous studio space. He could work spontaneously, from any viewpoint, in accordance with his mood. Fascinated by the unconscious his entire career, Pollock made his artistic ethos the exclusion of conscious thought.

He didn’t know it at the time, but Pollock was creating a time capsule. Pollock’s brother Sanford McCoy ran a business printing a children’s Baseball-themed board game on square Masonite panels. He gave a whole stack of spare panels to Pollock. In 1953 Pollock painted the panels white and used them to cover the gap-timbered floors in the barn and the upstairs rooms of the house. In 1956 he drove his car into a tree, killing himself and one of his two passengers. When the panels were prised up in 1988, the floor onto which the artist painted his most famous works was revealed, preserved as a permanent record of his process. In the spatters of paint and enamel which streak the floor are revealed the ghosts of Pollock’s masterpieces. While there has been talk of restricting access, visitors to the studio are currently encouraged to don foam booties and walk around on the floor. I had not anticipated the astonishing state in which the studio is preserved. Imagine my subsequent surprise at being able to traverse it. Like treading on a priceless mosaic, or a pristine floor in wet sneakers, it is a thrilling act which borders on transgression. Redolent of the autumn leaf-litter coating the ground outside, the aura of the artist-maker is tangible in his melancholy time capsule.

In a St. Moritz restaurant sits Lord Foster, architect extraordinaire, churning out sketches for a building on a site he has not yet visited and with inhabitants and activities he cannot yet know. In an East Hampton barn I find remnants of the artistic practice of a brilliant drunk, a man who attempted to bypass his own mind in the search for high art. Pollock’s paintings are the product of his media (enamel and aluminium paint, mixed media, sticks and turkey basters, painted on canvas sheets tacked to the floor) and the enlarged space he occupied. Foster’s sketches are likewise the product of his media (paper and pencil) and the space (temporally and physically displaced from context) in which he created them.

While Pollock’s individual works were intended to be self-evident and whole, retaining value when transplanted to the anaesthetised gallery environment, the evidence presented by his studio floor suggests otherwise. Amidst the chaos of competing patterns and colours, the imprints of Pollock’s canvasses are clearly visible, like missing puzzle pieces. The artist’s oeuvre, distributed throughout the world in major art museums and collections, is revealed as fragmentary and partial, orphaned from this generative space,. Furthermore, at this time of year, there is a tangible connection between the patterns and colours of the surrounding landscape, and those contained in the paintings. Continuity and context outmode the temporal product.

In Foster’s sketches, media and space are a proxy for materials and site. Created at altitude in St. Moritz, his sketches indicate the globalised, neutralised context in which the eventual building will be situated. In the friction and imprecision of Foster’s chosen medium, pencil and paper, are contained the last vestiges of handicraft in architecture. Just as we read significance into every stray dot and streak in Pollock’s composition, in this age of algorithm-generated architectural geometries and forms, every ink blot or pencil smudge from the hand of Foster is exalted, as the true intelligence of the craftsman once was.

1 Architect’s Challenge: A Sliver of a Space by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times 21/10/09