Last year Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, held its very first design week. Sponsored and organized by the government, it's been described to me as an underwhelming affair. This year, however, Design Museum Holon has stepped in to host what might (and indeed what ought to) go down in history as the city's first true Design Week.
The museum opened its doors only two years ago, but its been in the works for almost a decade as part of a citywide initiative to transform Holon into a hub for art, design and culture. In 2003 Ron Arad was invited by Mayor Moti Sasson and Managing Director Hana Hertsman to set the international standard with his sculptural Cor-Ten Steel banded beauty (above). The design school Holon Institute of Technology, which lies just across the street, was established over forty years ago, but Design Museum Holon is the first design museum in all of Israel, making it an obvious choice as the center of all the Design Week activities.
Unlike other design weeks that focus their efforts on a main exhibition hall filled with designer's booths and a program of talks and lectures, Design Museum Holon's Director, Alon Sapan and Galit Gaon, the Chief Curator, invited nineteen design week directors and design leaders from all over the world for what I think can be best described as design summer camp.
Every morning, after sharing a typical Israeli breakfast, the impressive lineup from Tokyo, Sofia, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Lodz, Budapest and Belgrade were picked up from their hotel in downtown Tel Aviv and bused to Holon. There, we split up into three groups and spent the day together listening to a stream of presentations made by aspiring Israeli designers. Each designer was given seven minutes to take us through a slideshow of their work, after which it was opened up to questions and feedback.
Sure, these designers could each have taken a booth in a large exhibition hall and we could have strolled by them, stopping only to look at the things that caught our eye, but for a country that readily admits to a lack of design history, what better way to introduce the world to its very active design present than to immerse us in personal conversations with local designers? We not only gained deeper understanding of what Israeli designers have to offer, but we got an up-close-and-personal insight into the reality of what it means to design in Israel today.
I, for one, noticed a surprising lack of furniture, architecture and other large scale projects, as well very little graphic or typographic design. The overwhelming majority of what we saw focused on small goods - jewelry, home and office products and gift items. When I walked around Tel Aviv I saw a similar aesthetic - plenty of jewelry shops, no furniture stores and only one object-centered design store, called Soho.
