Press

Often, when we go in search of environmentally friendly ideas or materials, we find ourselves back where we started, with the things our ancestors used. Go looking for the ultimate ‘greenhouse’ and you might find it has much in common with the traditional Highland blackhouse. This is the promising premise of the major exhibition of the most northerly of the Six Cities.

Unfortunately, it isn’t really explored. This isn’t so much one exhibition as a mixture of several: Greenhouse/Blackhouse which showcases locally developed, eco-friendly materials; New, Old, Green, about green housing from the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki; some models built by children; and the entries for Highland Housing Fair competition, for the design of a new eco-village near Inverness.

It’s a confusing package, part trade fair, part educational show, part architectural competition, housed ironically – in an ugly modern building which probably isn’t very eco-friendly. But there are plenty of ideas here, from new technology (solar panels that circulate liquid to heat water) to old (an Isle of Skye willow basket, stone flooring from Caithness).

What this exhibition does best is remind us of the simple values – recycling, creative thinking, quality workmanship – which apply to much more than just green housing, and of materials so obvious we are in danger of missing them. Take wood, for example: it’s cheap, plentiful, renewable; it looks good, is an excellent insulator and easy to work with. An all-round good guy.

Two further exhibitions are rolled into one round the corner at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. HomeRoom is a showcase of Highland-based design, furnishing and textiles. This One Feels About Right is a gathering of chairs commissioned from artists and designers which viewers are encouraged to try out for size.

It’s always fun to be invited to touch things in museums, and fitting that a festival of design should provide some multisensory experiences, such as sitting in the chair designed by a team from Orkney, with its accompanying press-and-listen soundscape, or the Cluasag Chair by glass designers Brodie Nairn and Nicola Burns, which feels oddly like sitting on ice.

But some of these are fantasy chairs, to be admired, not sat on: Rosie Jones Newman’s Sweetie Seatie, inlaid with liquorice allsorts; Neptune’s Throne, by John McGeogh, a Tolkienesque extragavaganza of driftwood; Sarah Barnes’s papier mache tribute to Elton John, with a curved keyboard for a seat, embellished with sparkly lyrics. These are chairs as art, not with functionality in mind.

There are also chairs of both types in Dimensions of Design at Stirling, but while HomeRoom feels like a welcoming, slightly chaotic, living room, Dimensions of Design, from the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, is clinically museumesque: 100 miniature chairs lined up in perspex cases.

They are displayed strictly chronologically, revealing that the history of the chair is not a linear progression: an elegant wooden chair from 1990 has much more in common with one from 1850 than with many of the chairs in between. Though the approach has an elegance to it, and there are photographs and sales brochures to put these chairs into context, it doesn’t offer explanations: what makes a Breuer or an Eames a popular classic? What is special about the chairs of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh?

And what of the chairs where creativity runs wild? The quirky, the ironic, those that question the very notion of what it means to be a chair? What do they achieve? Does anyone ever sit on them? These questions remain unanswered.

Down the road at The Changing Room, the curators sought an area where design meets contemporary art, and found it by looking at design for independent record labels. This is no surprise when you consider art schools produce almost as many musicians as artists, and that many contemporary artists have close ties with bands.

There is work here by David Shrigley for Deerhoof; Rob Churm for Park Attack; Lucy McKenzie for her own label Decemberism and for Erasure; Alex Frost for the 1990s. Perhaps in response to the fact that technology has made graphic design available to anyone with a PC and a desktop publishing package, these posters, record sleeves and T-shirts have a hand-crafted feel, a new kind of exclusivity.

The show also takes in Peter Saville, the influential graphic designer whose sleeves for the Factory record label’s output in the 1980s are almost as famous as the bands themselves, and examples from overseas, such as Montreal-based Seripop, which produces music posters as limited edition screenprints.

Now that much music is bought by download, are record sleeves also outmoded? It seems not. Small independent labels might do most of their business online, but they still produce designed materials, sometimes even providing it as a download along with the music. The age of the album may be passing, but the record sleeve is still alive.