Design Miami decision
by Cosmina Dinu
Proudly presenting you this news. Design Miami has announced Dutch designer Maarten Baas as winner of the designer of the year award 2009. New work, commissioned for the award, along with a retrospective of Baas’s work, will be presented at the December edition of Design Miami 09.
Each December, the prestigious award is presented to a designer who has made a significant
contribution to the progression of design. The designer of the year must demonstrate a long
history of consistent work, as well as outstanding work created within the last twelve months.
Now in its fifth year, the award has gone to an impressive list of esteemed designers,
including Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, Tokujin Yoshioka and the Campana Brothers.
He has allowed more people to accept and respect young design. But he is also a truly
phenomenal talent who has all the qualities of a great designer and whose work is
consistently strong and varied. He has a great sense of imagination and trusts himself
to explore his ideas to the maximum, constantly evolving while anchoring his work in
a craft-oriented approach. He has kept the design community gripped, like a good movie
where you can’t take your eyes off the screen, where each project is like one excellent
scene after another.
Design Miami Director Ambra Medda .
Real Time is the project that crowned Maarten’s activity to the point of his this year nominalization. My feeling is that we can call this award as the Dutch designer’s first of this kind.The show-event is produced by Diana Marrone together with Studio Maarten Baas and consists in 2 movies shot and cut in The Netherlands speaking about the passing of time.
Maarten Baas chooses the cinema language to re-shape a clock collection composed by two models. From the old style analogue-alarm to the digital time counter Maarten creates from zero the devices: from the interface to the internal and external “box”. Besides designing those, Baas animates the clocks with a theatre mechanism – with true and living lancets – by involving hundreds actors to sign the time.
3D prototypes are shown together with the movies and will work as rough description for the new Baas models of time counters. The passing of the time within the clock is given by multitudes of people who – shot and screened in a true interval of 12 or 24 hours – allow visitors to assist to an unusual render of time passing.
Watch the movies to see how they work:
Real Time – The Grandfather clock
Real Time – Sweepers’ clock
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