Shiro Kuramata: Memphis, Cappellini, Vitra
Shiro Kuramata spent the last fifteen years of his life dematerialising furniture into industrial gauze: nickel-plated expanded steel mesh for Vitra’s How High the Moon in 1986, clear acrylic resin embedded with artificial red roses for Miss Blanche in 1988, and glass plates bonded with UV-curing photosensitive adhesive for the 1976 Glass Chair. The career from the Kuramata Design Office in Tokyo in 1965 through his death on 1 February 1991 reads as a single, sustained argument: that an object’s job is to disappear and let its weight go with it. Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Milano invitation in 1981 supplied the international stage, but the work was already complete in its grammar. ...