Gitta Gschwendtner - 10 things I've learned about design
Gitta Gschwendtner designs exhibitions, furniture and interiors as well as creating public art for indoor and outdoor spaces. She takes a moment out of a busy schedule to share 10 things she’s learned about design.
Words by Pamela Buxton
1 Diversify. Furniture design alone wasn't enough for me. Even when I was still a student I could see that working just for furniture manufacturers wouldn't be easy since the royalty system meant that it would take a long time until you were earning enough to make a living from it. I realised I had to diversify.
In any case, I wouldn't like to do just one thing. I like a bit of everything - and find that the different projects cross-fertilise each other. These days I work very little with manufacturers. Sometimes almost all my work has been exhibitions, sometimes I'm doing more public art installations - the balance keeps changing. As a result, my work is very eclectic - ranging from the Seeds of Change garden on a barge with the artist Maria Thereza Alves to the Animal Wall of 1,000 bird and bat boxes in Cardiff. I particularly enjoy public-space projects where people are the elements that complete the space.
2 Tell a story. I'm definitely interested in function, but there are only so many ways to reinvent the chair. For me, the extra interest lay in finding another story to tell, and using furniture as a discipline to do that with. As a result, my sort of furniture design didn't fit perfectly with most manufacturers because I was trying to tell too many stories in the furniture. Instead, I found that I loved designing big spaces rather than cramming everything into one piece. The ArtBar [designed with Angel Monzon] was the start of these narrative spaces when I was still at the RCA.
Chair Bench, for the V&A Furniture Gallery. All the legs and chair backs were made traditionally by a chair maker and master carver
3 Exhibition design comes naturally. Exhibition designers come from many different disciplines. I find that the spaces involved give me a bigger canvas for telling a story. My design for the Medicine Man gallery at the Wellcome Collection typifies my approach - the whole room is a piece of furniture with this huge Wunderkammer cabinet of curiosities and all these drawers which you can pull out to explore deeper.
4 Every brief is a fresh start. I don't really have a particular aesthetic, house style or material preference. Everything comes out of the brief. For each project I do a bit of detective work to solve the particular problem, and the material comes out of that. There's always a point during the process when I'm frustrated and think I can't crack it, but then you get the breakthrough when the ideas suddenly make sense for the first time, and you finally know which way to go.
Sometimes you learn a lot from a project but then don't ever get to do anything again where you can use that knowledge, because every project is so different and you're always starting from scratch. But that's my choice to work like that.
5 I like collaboration. I haven't done a completely joint project for a while, although in the past I've worked with Carl Clerkin and William Warren. But when you work in exhibition design, you work very closely with the client and with the graphic designer, bouncing ideas back and forth to get something with total integrity. I've worked a lot with Frith Kerr at Studio Frith.
Extraordinary Stories, an exhibition in 2013 designed by Gschwendtner, about the Design Museum Collection opens to the public
6 Modern production techniques aren't always the answer. Of course they can be helpful, but not always. When I was designing the Chair Bench for the V&A Furniture Gallery I assumed that it could be 3D scanned and CNC routed, but the technology wasn't up to it. In the end, all the legs and chair backs were made the traditional way by a chair maker and a master carver.
7 You can't beat mock-ups. I don't do a lot of 3D renderings when I design. Instead, I like to build mock-ups with card or maybe wood, depending on what's appropriate. I find I get a much better sense of the proportions that way.
8 London is a fabulous place to be based as a designer. There are a lot of opportunities and challenges and competition, and there's so much going on. It is very expensive to live in London at the moment but I'm lucky that I've been in the same workspace in Hackney since 1999. You can talk about projects with other designers and there's a real sense of community.
Gschwendtner designed the Dior Illustrated exhibition (2010) at Somerset House, celebrating the work of illustrator René Gruau
9 You can never entirely relax. As an independent designer you are always worrying about where the work comes from, and for a while in the last recession the exhibition-design field got very crowded with lots of big architecture practices competing for the work. I've had two children along the way and I enjoy the juggle between the different parts of my life.
10 I wouldn't change a thing about my career. I'd definitely do everything exactly the same again, but I don't know if I'd advise anyone else to do it that way. A design education costs so much these days - I studied for six years - and I do worry that design will become more elitist as a result.
Gitta Gschwendtner studied furniture design at the Royal College of Art and has worked for the Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, British Council, South Bank Centre and Somerset House. Recent work includes the Extraordinary Stories exhibition at the Design Museum, the Drawer Kitchen for Schiffini, and the ongoing design of five reception spaces at he Guy's & St Thomas' Cancer Treatment Centre in London, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
