neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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essay

this short text was published by Architectural Deisgn, Vol 72 No 4, entitled Furniture + Architecture guest-edited by Edwin Heathcote, July 2002

Look at me, look at me, look at me

It was the design historian Reyner Banham who coined the phrase ‘furniturization’. He was writing in the seminal catalogue for Modern Chairs 1918-1970 an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the summer of 1970. Banham evolved the term furniturization to describe a change that he recognized in the material world. A change in how previously unselfconscious and virtually invisible domestic artifacts –essentially the bibelot of everyday life, chairs, taps, cruets, etc- had suddenly become great design objects that demanded attention. Previously humble things were growing vast promotional superstructures that meshed beautifully with the rise of a culture of retail, celebrity and promotion.

Ice Trade

This is a short text that accompanied an exhibition at Chelsea Space in London, January 24th - March 3rd 2007

The ice trade, that is the trade in huge cubes of ice hewn from the frozen lakes of North America or Scandinavia and shipped to warmer climes, exists somewhere between brute fact and fairytale.

The trade existed, flourished even, throughout the later part of the 19th century. Grainy photographs depicting sawn meter square cubes of ice, cut from the frozen crusts of freshwater lakes are waiting, stored as documents in relevant archives. You can visit luxury loft apartments inserted into the hollow remnants of bunker-like Ice houses – warehouses for frozen water - found in many former ports of Britain, especially in Bristol, Liverpool, and London. There is also compulsive testimony from the American author, naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau writing one of the foundational texts of the environmental movement, Walden (published in 1854). Thoreau records the cold winter of 46/7 when from the window of his forest cabin he sees the frozen skin of Walden pond being stripped by a hundred Irish labourers, and carted away.

‘[….] in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre.’