Marc Newson, born in 1963, is an Australian from Sydney. He began young, stimulated by Italian design, which he devoured in style magazines. Inspired by the streamlined forms of the fifties and sixties, he uses even marble in casual and unconventional ways. Often compared to Philippe Starck because of the success they have both enjoyed, but working in very different styles, Newson’s veins have the blood of an artist as well as a designer.
One of the small circle of designers who are influential worldwide, Newson has designed something for everyone, innovating and experimenting well beyond the boundaries of art. He is as well-known as an artist or rock musician. Marc Newson was born in Australia but spent his childhood traveling in Europe and Asia, before studying jewelry and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts. Still a student, he began to gain experience and experiment with interior design.
After graduating in 1984 he won a grant from the Australian Crafts Council and prepared an exhibition at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Sydney. It included the Lockheed Lounge, a chaise longue seemingly made entirely from riveted aluminum and looking like an UFO fallen to earth.
At twenty-four he moved to Tokyo, where he worked from 1987 to 1991 designing items such as the Orgone Lounge, Black Hole Table and Felt Chair, featured in numerous exhibitions in Asia and Europe.
In 1991 Marc Newson opened his own studio in Paris and received commissions from prestigious European companies, including Flos for lighting, Cappellini and Moroso for furniture. He formed the Ikepod Watch Company, a joint venture to manufacture the wrist watches he designed, and turned out limited editions of aluminum furniture, including the Event Horizon Table and the Orgone Chair. In the mid-1990s Marc Newson designed a series of restaurants – Coast in London, Mash & Air in Manchester and Osman in Cologne – as well as the interiors of Syn, a recording studio in Tokyo, and outlets for W.&L.T., the the Belgian designer Walter Von Beirendonck’s casual clothing line.
His style is distinctive and draws partly on the streamlined style of car design of the 1950s and 1960s. One of his icons is the Aston Martin DB4. He has designed absolutely innovative seating, like the Alufelt Chair (1993), whose lines have the sinuousness of the human body.
In 1997 Newson moved to London, where with Benjamin De Haan he opened Marc Newson Ltd., a bigger office capable of more ambitious industrial projects. Since then he has designed glassware for Iittala, kitchen and bathroom accessories for Alessi, and household objects for Magis, including the famous Dish Doctor draining rack and the Rock doorstop. Newson also designed the interior of the Falcon 900B private jet, the MN01 bicycle for Biomega in Denmark and the Ford 021C concept car.
Besides winning numerous awards, Newson has shown his work at a number of exhibitions. He created Bucky (an installation-sculpture) for an event at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in 1995. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney recently held a major retrospective of his work. His designs have been added to the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Design Museum in London, the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris and the Vitra Design Museum at Weil am Rhein.
Booth-Clibborn Editions published a book on his work in 1999, followed in 2001 by a volume published by Thames & Hudson.
Newson is Adjunct Professor of Design at Sydney College of the Arts and at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was appointed “Royal Designer for Industry” in Britain.
He is unquestionably one of the most significant and precociously influential designers of his generation.
He has created sculptures and bookcases in Carrara marble, and styled countless stores around the world. His forms are invariably sinuous and organic, all distinguished by a kind of spatial vision which seems almost extraterrestrial, interstellar.
Newson’s design work can also be witty, like the Dom Pérignon champagne ice bucket. The packaging encloses the ice in a form that reproduces the shape of the brand’s magnum bottle.
Newson is much in demand for transport design. In this field he has developed an innovative bike with an aluminum frame for Biomega, a speed bike for Trek used by Lance Armstrong, a number of concepts for small cars from Ford and Honda, and the livery or interiors of airliners. For the Riva shipyard he has designed a “Newson” version of the Aquariva power boat.
In architecture, Marc Newson has embodied his spontaneous creativity in works of broad scope and untrammeled innovation such as the Hotel Puerta America in Madrid (2005). Nineteen of the world’s finest architects participated in the creation of this hotel of the future. Each of the twelve floors bears the hallmark of a different talent. Newson designed the Marmo Bar using white Statuario Venato marble. The bar counter weighs over six tons while the walls and ceilings are decorated with four hundred thin strips of laser-cut aluminum.
Newson again used marble extensively in Azzedine Alaia’s Paris showroom (2006) and Qantas’s first class lounge at Sydney and Melbourne airports (2007). He has made special use of Carrara marble as a highly distinctive and richly significant material. “Sometimes I start with the material, sometimes with the idea,” said Marc. “In these cases the materials were the inspiration. I started by identifying materials that had always interested me but I’d never used. Often the context strikes me more than the materials themselves. It’s the context that’s new, not the materials.”
His first solo exhibition in the United States was presented in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Here Newson used gray Bardiglio extensively as a plastic and ductile material to be extruded. Each work exhibited was molded in a single piece.
At a time when the distinctions between art and design are blurred and being hotly debated, Newson is exploring many new frontiers with materials and techniques transposed from one context to another to create complex and sometimes disconcerting forms. The ribbon in his extruded tables and chairs and the web as the inspiration for the cells of the Voronoi Shelf are cut from a single block of Carrara marble. He develops large meshed metal forms using a series of algorithms based on the irregular Voronoi cell. A more playful note appears in his polished nickel surfboard and the Damask folding knife in exquisite sintered bronze.
Newson is unquestionably good at promoting himself. He has grasped opportunities with ingenuity and resourcefulness. The fact of coming from Down Under perhaps gave him the necessary energy. Marc has always seen it as an 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. Coming from Australia and studying jewelry and sculpture, my design was self-taught and instinctive. But as a boy I was surrounded by Italian designer objects and devoured articles in Domus and Ottagono at the newsstand where I worked part time. So I knew the masters of European design.”
In 2005, Newson was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the hundred most influential people of the year.
Roberto Franzoni
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