Biography

MARC NEWSON (1963-) is known for his funkily futuristic, but technically rigorous approach to design. Born in Sydney, he has worked from studios in Tokyo, Paris and, now, London, to design everything from a private jet to a Ford car.

No sooner had J. Mays, Ford’s design director, called Marc Newson offering a dream project –a concept car – than the designer went to work. For months, Newson pored over automotive books and magazines and peered closely at cars in the street to help him “to figure out ways of doing it better.”When the result of his research was unveiled at the 1999 Tokyo Motor Show, the Ford 021C combined what Newson described as the “totally naïve shape – so simple that it’s completely unforgiving” of a boxy 1950s saloon with radical detailing. The doors opened from the centre. The trunk rolled out from the rear and opened from the top. Newson painted the under-carriage above the wheels in the same 021C Pantone orange as the body because he’d noticed how ugly the “shitty black stuff you see there” looked on other cars.

Many of his innovations were in the interior, the part of the car which automotive designers usually ignore. The seats swivelled on pedestals, the dashboard was jewel-like in its detailing and, when the light was switched on, an electro-luminiscent film glowed snowy white across the ceiling. The 021C also told Newson’s story as a designer. The dashboard dials were reminisicent of his Ikepod watches and the steering wheel to his 1997 Alessi coat hook. The hourglass orgone that had been Newson’s favourite motif since the 1986 Lockheed Lounge cropped up in the carpet and tyre tread.

Literal references apart, the 021C also acts as a neat illustration of Marc Newson’s approach to design: don’t just tinker with existing typologies, but take a long lateral look at them and imagine how the perfect version would be. “The thing that has always driven me as a designer,” he once said, “is feeling pissed off by the shitty stuff around me and wanting to make it better.”As a child, and later an art student, in Australia, Newson had no notion of what it meant to be an industrial designer. Born in Sydney in 1963, Newson’s entrée to design came through his mother (his father had left when he was a baby) who took him to live at a beachfront hotel she managed which he remembers as being “full of all this really cool Italian stuff: Joe Colombo trolleys and Sacco bean bags”. In his teens, they travelled in Europe and Asia, until Newson returned to Sydney where he studied jewellery and sculpture. He soon applied those skills to furniture and mugged up on design history by “borrowing” copies of imported Italian magazines, like Domus and Ottogano, from the newsagent where he worked part-time. “That was how I got to know about Memphis and all the other stuff going on in Europe.”

Newson has always maintained that it was a huge advantage to grow up in Australia, a country without an indigenous design tradition. “If I’d been studying design in Italy, I’d have been taught by people who’d been taught by Ettore Sottsass or Mario Bellini, and I’d have found having that tradition stuffed down my throat really stifling,” he said. “Coming from Australia and studying jewellery and sculpture, my design was self-taught and instinctive.”His break-through piece was the 1986 Lockheed Lounge, the realisation of his image of “a fluid metallic form, like a giant blob of mercury” based “loosely, very loosely” on the 18th century chaises longue he had seen in reproductions of French paintings. Newson made it himself in “a couple of miserable months” of hammering hundreds of aluminium panels on to an home-made fibreglass mould. After the Lockheed Lounge was exhibited at a Sydney gallery, photographs of it appeared in magazines all over the world.

For the next few years, he eked out a living from odd jobs and grants while making prototypes of a few pieces. After a second hand-made metal piece, the 1987 Pod of Drawers, Newson adopted the sleek, luxuriantly industrial style which would become his signature: starting with the 1988 Embryo Chair, another reworking of the orgone, this time covered in brightly-coloured wetsuit fabric. He revisited the orgone and Aussie watersports in the 1989 Orgone Lounge, which was shaped like a surfboard in homage to Sydney surfies.That year, Newson moved to Tokyo to work for Teruo Kurosaki, the Japanese design entrepreneur. Freed from the usual young designer’s struggle for funds, Newson put some old designs, like the Embryo Chair, into production and developed new ones, like the 1990 Wicker Chair. Kurosaki exhibited his work at the Milan Furniture Fair, thereby launching Newson in Europe. With commissions from Cappellini and Flos, Newson left Tokyo for Paris in 1992.

He eked out a living– “people thought I was loaded because I got a lot of press, but I was still strapped for cash” – by selling limited editions of sculptural pieces, such as the 1992 Event Horizon Table, and designing restaurants, like Coast in London (1995) and Komed in Cologne (1996). When he was paid a windfall $20,000 for designing a Shiseido perfume bottle, Newson splashed out on his then-dream car, an Aston Martin DB4.Vintage Aston Martins, like the DB4, were an influence over his work, as were 1960s Lamborghinis and Ken Adams’ fantastical movie sets and the space race. Newson was – and still is - inspired by an eclectic collection of designers: from Joe Colombo “because of his killer shapes” and Achille Castiglioni “so clever and witty”, to Enzo Mari “cool, very poetic” and Buckminster Fuller for “his nutty ideas and amazing imagination”.

By the mid-1990s, he was experimenting with CAD software helped by Benjamin De Haan, who became his business partner. “I don’t design on a computer: never have, never will,” Newson explained. “I always have an idea in my head and it goes into a sketchbook. All I do on the computer is join the dots. It’s a great tool for verification but there’s no way that seeing something on a computer will ever be as good as actually seeing and touching it.”De Haan’s computer skills proved invaluable as Newson took on commissions for mass-manufactured products from Alessi and Magis. In 1997, they moved the studio to London, where Newson won not one but two dream jobs: designing the cabin and livery of a Falcon 900B long-range jet and the 021C.

Those projects took his career him to another level. A bona fide superstar alongside Philippe Starck, who had encouraged Cappellini and Flos to hire him in the early 1990s, and his friend, Jasper Morrison, Newson juggled jobs for Nike and The Gap, with existing clients, such as Magis and Cappellini, as well as a Brisbane apartment building.He also found time to compile a collection of objects which would provide an even neater illustration of his design sensibility than the 021C when exhibited at the Design Museum as the Conran Foundation Collection 2001. Given £30,000 to spend by Sir Terence Conran, Newson compiled a fantasy shopping list including an hand-made Rich Harbour balsawood surfboard and a cosmonaut’s space suit worn on a Soviet Space Agency mission into space. © Design Museum

Designboom interview with Mark Newson

what is the best moment of the day?…..ummmmmm…. siesta time. I suppose. (ha)after lunch. you know when you start to fall asleep. you know (makes snoring noise)… what kind of music do you listen to at the moment?I’ve always listened to a lot of film music, actually. ah..you know.. no particular films, but just I like film music for some weird reason.do you listen to the radio?(cough) never. I like the idea of it though.what books do you have on your bedside table?oh none, because I don’t have a bedside table. I don’t even have a bed. I’m staying at a friends house since… (undistinguishable)do you read design magazines?never.where do you get news from? newspapers?newspapers. I do read newspapers, and occasionaly when I’m staying at hotels in different countries I end up watching CNN unfortunately.do you notice how women are dressing?do you have any preferences?yeah, I think I do. but I don’t have particular preferences in terms of what they wear. I think it’s more a question of how they wear it. you know like, there’s many different looks and I think you can wear any look really really well, I mean if it suits you. if you wear it well, if your good in your clothes. I guess it’s more a question of confidence.what kind of clothes do you avoid wearing?I never wear a suit, but you know I have to sit with a lot of people who do…not that there’s anything wrong with wearing suits, but you know, generally the people that tend to wear them are…more boring than the ones that don’t.do you have any pets?I do not have any pets. no, but I’d really love to have a dog, if I didn’t travel so much.when you were a child, what did you want to be?I was fascinated by the idea of making things.where do you work on your designs and projects?I work alot on my designs and projects on aeroplanes. I know that sounds really clichéd… boring, but to be honest with you, it’s really the only moments that i have when there’s kind of really nothing going on, it’s kind of like being in a sensory deprivation tank, if you don’t have to watch the shit films that they have of course. ….but you know especially on long world trips to japan or something…15 hours on a plane is a perfect time to really immerse yourself in a project.when you’re working, do you discuss or exchange ideas with colleagues, with other designers?very rarely in fact. because I find that I normally work the best when I’m on my own, when I’m in a perfectly kind of silent eviornment. and the most important thing for me is not to have any stress around, so in fact when I’m with my colleagues which is to say the people I work with in my office, I don’t do design. I don’t design in my office ever….I answer the telephone, I read email. I work. I develop designs, I engineer designs on computer, but that’s not where the ideas are born. describe your style, like a good friend of yours would describe it.I don’t even know if there are any good friends that could describe, stylistically what I do. I’ve never heard anyone describe, what I do, umm, very well. but (cough) it…my aim is not… I don’t…it’s just so hard stylistically to kind of classify what I do. I just dont think there is any…, sometimes it’s round, sometimes it’s less round… sometimes it’s colors.the point is with my design, with what I do, whether it’s design or whether it’s art, because I do everything from designing airplane interiors, which is like on one level really pure engineering(ok theres a bit of design there, but it’s mostly engineering). on the other end of the spectrum, I’m designing sculptures, things like the lockheed lounge, there’s a whole lot of limited edition pieces that I designed that are being sold at auctions, and things like that…… now that’s my fantasy, that’s my pure… emotion just running wild. no-ones telling me what to do, no-ones’s telling me how to do it. so I have both of those things at each end of the spectrum, and I’m doing everything in between from wristwatches to interiors to suitcases to toilets.do you think there is an evolution from the begining of your work until now, in your thoughts, in your forms?yeah, of course there is, there is a sort of an evolution. the problem with the word evolution I guess, is that it implies that there is an end, that you know it’s going…wel,l it’s gonna end up somewhere, and I don’t know where it’s gonna end up. it’s evolving, but I don’t know where. it’s changing. although at the same time I think there’s a thread you know, I think there’s a link there’s something which attaches each thing I do together, like a thread… I hope… that’s consistency.do you have fun working?sometimes, not all the time. you know the the big difference between what I do know, and what I did ten years ago, is that now it’s really a job, now I have people working for me, now I have a company, now I have responsibilities, now I have to sit in really boring meetings… I often find myself in situations though I ask myself what I’m doing there. so there are aspects of what I do, that I don’t like, but that’s part of mass production and industry.

which project has given you the most satisfaction?

it’s impossible for me to isolate one particular project that’s given me the most satisfaction. there are many projects that I’ve done, that I’m happy with. in fact I’m happy with everything I’ve done. becasue if I wasn’t happy with it…- it takes two to three years to develop a project, and that’s two to three years - if you’re not happy with it you kill it… you know (poof) it doesn’t happen…it happens, if it’s not going well. only about 70 % of my works come to an end.you know it’s a hell of a lot of work… two or three years.I’m a big believer in not trying to… uhhh… correct something which is broken.I believe that you just forget it and start again.

is there any designer and/or architect, you appreciate a lot?

yeah there are many…ummm.there are really a lot actually when I think about it, people like bruno munari, many artists actually more so than designers. although of course I’m fans of people like castiglioni and and other people from his generation.

and those still active, are there any particular ones you appreciate?

you probably might be surprised when I mention people like the bouroullec brothers or jasper morrison, or… the usual suspects.

what are you afraid of regarding the future ?

I think I’m afraid of the freneticism, that the kind of hyper-activity that we’re kind of heading towards, that the sort of inhumanity in terms of the way we work and the way we live our lives, that we’re kind of ending up in a point where you know we kind of lose ourselves, and forget ourselves, or forget what we like doing and how we like to live. I look at it from a personal point of view, where you know you often find yourself in situations, and you don’t know why, and the amount of control that you lose becasue of the way society is structured..

do you have fun working?

sometimes, not all the time. you know the the big difference between what I do know, and what I did ten years ago, is that now it’s really a job, now I have people working for me, now I have a company, now I have responsibilities, now I have to sit in really boring meetings… I often find myself in situations though I ask myself what I’m doing there. so there are aspects of what I do, that I don’t like, but that’s part of mass production and industry.

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which project has given you the most satisfaction?

it’s impossible for me to isolate one particular project that’s given me the most satisfaction. there are many projects that I’ve done, that I’m happy with. in fact I’m happy with everything I’ve done. becasue if I wasn’t happy with it…- it takes two to three years to develop a project, and that’s two to three years - if you’re not happy with it you kill it… you know (poof) it doesn’t happen…it happens, if it’s not going well. only about 70 % of my works come to an end.you know it’s a hell of a lot of work… two or three years.I’m a big believer in not trying to… uhhh… correct something which is broken.I believe that you just forget it and start again.

is there any designer and/or architect, you appreciate a lot?

yeah there are many…ummm.there are really a lot actually when I think about it, people like bruno munari, many artists actually more so than designers. although of course I’m fans of people like castiglioni and and other people from his generation.

and those still active, are there any particular ones you appreciate?

you probably might be surprised when I mention people like the bouroullec brothers or jasper morrison, or… the usual suspects.

what are you afraid of regarding the future ?

I think I’m afraid of the freneticism, that the kind of hyper-activity that we’re kind of heading towards, that the sort of inhumanity in terms of the way we work and the way we live our lives, that we’re kind of ending up in a point where you know we kind of lose ourselves, and forget ourselves, or forget what we like doing and how we like to live. I look at it from a personal point of view, where you know you often find yourself in situations, and you don’t know why, and the amount of control that you lose becasue of the way society is structured.