Antiques: Thomas Chippendale at Christie’s London

The landmark Thomas Chippendale auction at Christie’s in London is one of many events celebrating the 300th anniversary of cabinetmaker’s birth

“A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.” So said Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Modernist architect par excellence and one-time head of the Bauhaus, who not only was responsible for some of the 20th century’s most influential buildings, but who also knew a thing or two about designing iconic chairs.

In referencing Thomas Chippendale, Mies was commenting on more than just the mastery of the 18th-century English cabinetmaker, whose reputation was made through his designing of furniture for most of Georgian Britain’s aristocratic elite. Chippendale was the first designer to have a style of furniture named after him and, even during his lifetime his reputation was such that he became one of those rare characters – like those other famous Georgians (Robert) Adam, (Josiah) Wedgwood and the gunmaker (James) Purdey – for whom a single name continues to suffice.

In doing so, Chippendale achieved a level of what we would now call “brand recognition”, which has lasted for more than 250 years. He is synonymous not only with a particular type of Georgian furniture, but also with exquisite quality, unparalleled craftsmanship and a sense of style that has never gone out of fashion.

The question of Chippendale’s fame and achievement continues to be relevant, not least because 2018 is the tricentenary of the cabinetmaker’s birth, an anniversary that’s being celebrated in exhibitions at several Chippendale-related stately homes across the United Kingdom and in a special auction that is being held at Christie’s in London on July 5.

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Art: the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo at the Mosaic Rooms, London

Thanks to a series of carefully curated exhibitions at major institutions throughout London this summer, the British capital is as good a place as any from which to assess the recent past and potential future for contemporary culture in the Arab and wider Muslim world.

While the Design Museum is hosting a show dedicated to the work of the Tunisian couturier Azzedine Alaia, the work of the eight shortlisted finalists for the fifth Jameel Prize can be seen on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

At the other end of Exhibition Road a 20-metre-tall pyramid, The London Mastaba, floats improbably on the Serpentine, the star exhibit in a show that chronicles Christo’s unrequited, four-decade-long love affair with Abu Dhabi, where the 83-year-old artist still hopes to build the largest sculpture in the world.

At the other end of the scale, a display of newly acquired and very mundane objects – a milk bottle, magazines, cigarette packages, a banknote and a vinyl record – strikes just the right note at the British Museum. They are used alongside a video installation by the artist Maha Maamoun in her exhibition The Past is Present: becoming Egyptian in the 20th Century to investigate the interplay between ancient heritage and modern Egyptian identities.

And yet it is another ­modestly-sized show that also aims to bring something of Cairo to London that takes the prize for the exhibition with the best sense of timing.

Staged at The Mosaic Rooms, What do you mean, here we are? commemorates the 20th anniversary of Cairo’s famous Townhouse Gallery and is also part of a series of exhibitions mounted to celebrate The Mosaic Rooms’ tenth anniversary.

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Suketu Mehta: Bombay’s laureate on Abu Dhabi’s backstreets

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, Suketu Mehta has gained global acclaim for his book on Mumbai and his writings on migration and community in major world cities, Nick Leech talks to him about Abu Dhabi.

When it comes to thinking about cities, the view from his temporary home at New York University Abu Dhabi provides Suketu Mehta with all the material he needs.

“When I look at a place like this, I wonder what genius of an urban planner thought that it would be a great idea to make a city without sidewalks and decided that the automobile would have primacy over the pedestrian?” the writer wonders, looking across Saadiyat Island’s twisting motorways and flyovers towards the hotels that line its distant coastline.

“I’d love to be able to walk to the beach but I can’t really go for a walk outside this apartment. And, as you can see, I’m literally at the end of my road,” he says, pointing to a patch of waste ground beneath his window where six lanes of motorway simply disappear into the sand.

More than his role as an associate professor of journalism at New York University, his alma mater, it’s Mehta’s thinking and writing about urbanism that have brought him to NYUAD.

Since January, the award-winning author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found has been teaching a course at the university that not only involves looking at fiction, film, non-fiction and poetry, but also includes field trips to places such as Dubai’s Hor Al Anz, a neighbourhood that he considers to be one of the UAE’s more inspiring destinations.

“It’s the Jackson Heights or the Southall of Dubai. We hung out, we walked the streets, had a biryani and I really felt at home,” Mehta enthuses.

“The more time I spend here the more I realise how little I know and how wrong the rest of the world is about this place,” he says. “It’s much more complex.”

It is difficult to consider a contemporary writer who is more committed to cities and city life than Mehta.

Born in Kolkata in 1963, he spent his early years in Mumbai before his family moved to Jackson Heights, a multicultural neighbourhood in Queens, New York, in 1977 and it was 21 years before he returned to the city he still refers to as Bombay.

After years spent working as a journalist and editor for business-to-business computing titles, Mehta returned to India with a determination to write and a seductively simple question: Can you ever go home again?

“I thought I would go to Bombay for a year to write a quick and dirty book about a quick and dirty city,” Mehta told the writer William Dalrymple in a panel discussion at last year’s Zee Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder, Colorado.

Fortunately, as it turns out, the budding writer was mistaken. Mehta spent two and a half years immersed in the company of gangsters and hitmen, Bollywood moguls and call girls, police chiefs, religious rioters, actors and politicians.

“In Bombay I met people who lived closer to their seductive extremities than anyone I had ever known. Shouted lives,” Mehta writes in the book that resulted from his unexpected sojourn.

“These are not normal people. They live out the fantasies of normal people. And the kind of work they do affects all other spheres of their lives … in this sense they have become artists.”

Published as his first book in 2004, Maximum City earned Mehta a place on the finalist’s list for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and catapulted him, then 41, to the forefront of world literature.

Before long, Maximum City came to be considered not just as a great book about a great Indian city, Mumbai’s answer to Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi or Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Calcutta, but it also earned Mehta a place in the pantheon of literary urban investigators alongside Dickens and Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Mitchell and Jan Morris.

Since the publication of Maximum City, Mehta has spent a decade writing articles for publications such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, Time magazine, and Newsweek while working on a new translation of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography and researching material for his next book, a study of the immigrant experience in New York tentatively titled City of the Second Chance.

At the same time, Mehta, whose accent still ties him to Mumbai and bears no trace of his many years in the United States, has been visiting cities as the only writer to participate in Urban Age, an itinerant city research programme established by Richard Sennett and Ricky Burdett at the London School of Economics.

“I’ve never taken a course in urbanism or architecture, but after Maximum City I was asked to be part of this travelling group of urbanists, planners, architects and mayors,” he says.

“I started getting invited to their conferences in cities all around the world where there were all these debates taking place about the future of cities. I started wondering why they invited me, a complete amateur at all this, and I realised that it’s because the story of the city needs to be told.”

For Mehta, writing about cities and the deliberations of the people who have the power to shape their future is a civic duty and helps to ensure that, rather than talking about buildings, the debate around our urban future focuses on people instead.

“The jargon of urbanism has become like a Latin mass and this is where I think storytelling needs to re-enter the whole conversation,” he says. “There’s a role for journalists and writers to listen to the deliberations of the good and the great and to translate this into stories for the rest of us.

“If you’re a literary theorist or a philosopher you can write in obscure journals, but it will not have much effect on the rest of the public. But the dreams of urban planners can become our nightmares because we have to live with them.”

The outcome of all this travel, research and meetings with urbanism’s great and good is a book-length essay, The Secret Life of Cities, that Mehta describes as an amuse-bouche for his forthcoming book about New York.

Focusing on migration, alienation and community in the world’s cities, the book, which is yet to be published in English, examines just what it is that makes great cities great, a quality, Mehta insists, that is quite different from the liveability indexes produced by organisations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“The world’s most liveable cities always include places like Canberra and Munich, places made for expat bankers that completely bore the s*** out of me,” Mehta says.

“I think there needs to be another list of liveable cities that considers that metropolitan excitement, that sense of chaos and informality and a little bit of unpredictability, even a little frisson of danger. This is what makes for a great city.”

Rather than the sterile lakeside sidewalks of cities such as Geneva, the epitome of the kind of vibrant urban environment that Mehta favours is the Coney Island boardwalk and beach in New York, which serve as a metaphor for a workable urbanism that is open and realistic.

“A great city doesn’t have to include everyone. You could sit at Ruby’s Bar in Coney Island and watch the whole parade of humanity,” he says.

“Bangladeshis in their hijabs next to Russian girls in bikinis, and anarchists from the East Village in leather and Dominicans, and they all walk side by side before going off to their little knots on the beach.

“It’s not that they’re all happy and talking to each other. It’s not that you’ll get invited to every picnic on the beach, but somewhere on the beach there’s a picnic that you too can go to.”

The alternative view, as Mehta sees it, is a socialist notion of equality that he rejects as utopian and unrealistic, preferring instead to focus on openness, tolerance and dignity.

It is an approach that is heavily influenced by Mehta’s upbringing and from his teenage years when he grew up in a building in Jackson Heights in Queens, the easternmost and largest of New York’s five boroughs and a district that is statistically and linguistically the most diverse in the US.

In the building where the Mehta family lived, which was owned by a Turk and managed by a Greek, Indians lived alongside Pakistanis, and Jews lived next to Muslims.

“It’s not that we started loving each other. When we went inside we all said horrible racist things about somebody else. But there was a cessation of hostility and an understanding that we were all making a new future,” Mehta says.

When it comes to the UAE’s future, the real stories, he believes, lie not in the architectural visions that adorn the property developer’s hoardings he sees from his window, but in the backstreets of the neighbourhoods where the vast majority of Abu Dhabi’s population lives.

“This city is made up of layers, but the most visible layer – the one you see in advertisements and on airlines – is only the tip of it,” he says.

“There are all these other layers that are South Asian and Filipino and African and Egyptian, and the most interesting parts of the city are the interstitial spaces where these bubbles mix.

“There’s a great Maximum Abu Dhabi or Maximum Dubai to be written,” Mehta insists. “I’m certainly not the person to write it, but I think somewhere out there there is a young writer – they could be Emirati, they could be Pakistani or they could be English – who is collecting observations and stories and will write the great non-fiction book about this city, because it certainly demands it.”

This article was originally published in The National

Photography: Olivia Arthur’s Stranger in Dubai

The product of a three-month-long artist’s residency, Olivia Arthur’s ‘Stranger’ takes an episode from Dubai’s recent history as its starting point, the forgotten MV Dara maritime disaster.

When you see somewhere you know through someone else’s eyes, it’s impossible not to judge the tone and tenor of their vision and to try to match it with your own.

That’s certainly the case with Olivia Arthur’s work, which was exhibited by Dubai’s Cuadro Gallery as part of this week’s Warehouse421 and Abu Dhabi Art’s Galleries Week, held in Mina Zayed.

Part of a wider project titled Stranger, Arthur’s photograph was suitably maritime and local for an art fair held on the margins of a port and dhow harbour.

The picture features a young South Asian man standing in the sunlit waters of a shallow sea, and for anyone familiar with Dubai’s interstitial spaces, the totemic pillars in the photograph’s background immediately reveal its location – the beach at the base of the incomplete and abandoned Palm Jebel Ali.

The real difference however, between Arthur’s bleached and beguiling image and so many of the photographs that are currently taken of the UAE is that rather than falling into the trap of making trite and didactic statements – about migrant labour, the UAE’s culture of excess or its unbridled urbanisation – it raises more questions than answers: just how old is the picture; what is the man doing; and what, if anything, does the image mean?

The product of a three-month-long artist’s residency sponsored by Fairmont The Palm and Project Encounter, that Arthur undertook in 2013 and 2014, Stranger takes an episode from Dubai’s recent history as its starting point – a maritime disaster whose 56th anniversary took place on April 8.

On that date in 1961, MV Dara, a British India Line steamship that used to ply its trade between Bombay and Karachi, Bahrain and Basra, sank in the waters off the coast of Dubai.

The deadliest disaster in the Gulf’s peacetime maritime history, an estimated 238 lives were lost. Some of the victims’ bodies were recovered from the shallow waters, but some were not. Among the families of those missing, there are still relatives who hold out the hope that their loved ones will return.

“What if someone could have survived on an island in the Gulf?” Arthur asks in the 224-page book and nine-minute film that are the key components of Stranger. “What would they see if they came to the city now, 50 years later?”

“I was totally fascinated by the idea and by that belief, that you could continue to look for someone, after 50 years,” the photographer tells me from her studio in London.

“But Stranger isn’t about those families or the victims; they’re just a starting point that allows people to interpret things in different ways, and I think that’s more interesting,” she says.

Arthur is one of only nine living female photographers to belong to Magnum Photos, the prestigious agency founded at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour.

The agency community will celebrate its 70th anniversary this summer with an exhibition at Moma in June in which Arthur’s film from Stranger, not yet screened in the UAE, will form a key part.

Despite its association with a haunting story, none of the images used in Stranger are staged, including those that Arthur took when she eventually dived down to see the wreck, which now rests 20 kilometres off the coast.

The context of Arthur’s documentary images however, affords them a dreamlike quality that allows them float between fiction and fact, questioning their relationship with reality.

“At what point can you change what something means by placing it in a different context?,” she asks.

“For some people it might be about the way they set their photographs up, but can also be about the context you set them in and the way you put them out.”

As a body of work, Stranger is not the first time Arthur has adopted a strategy of placing documentary images within a conceptual framework. Her first major project, Jeddah Diary, used a similar technique to examine the experience of women in another port town on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula.

“Both Dubai and Jeddah are misunderstood places. They have lots of different worlds within them and I think that makes it quite hard to talk about them,” she explains.

“If you do it in a straightforward documentary way and say ‘this place is like this’, then it will be misleading because it won’t represent the complexity of the place, so that’s why I ended up with the work that I have.”

This article originally appeared in The National

Design: the fine print behind Dubai’s new font

The recent introduction of the Dubai font, which made world headlines, has been celebrated and questioned. Nick Leech considers the fine print behind the typeface.

At the end of April 2017, Dubai added yet another acquisition to its steadily growing list of attributes.

No longer just a city, an emirate, a tourist destination or even home to the world’s tallest building and busiest airport, the city now also has its own official typeface, the Dubai font.

The product of a 2-year-long partnership between the government of Dubai, the computer giant Microsoft and Monotype, the owner of some of the most popular and influential typefaces ever created – Times New Roman, Arial and Gill Sans – the font was commissioned in 2015 by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai and chairman of Dubai’s Executive Council.

The benefits of the partnership that produced the font became clear at its unveiling at in a launch event that was held at the Dubai Opera. 

Not only was the font free to download from its own website – it has all the social media accoutrements that any self-respecting digital wannabe could want including its own hashtag, #Expressyou – but it would also be distributed as a default Arabic and Latin font through Microsoft Office 365.

Added to the entities involved in the deal the scale of the launch – at a stroke it was made available to Office 365’s 100 million regular users in 180 countries world-wide – caught the imagination of the media and suddenly the quotidian became the stuff of headlines and the usually obscure world of type design became international news. 

Such attention for the issue of how and what we write and read may have set typographer’s pulses racing, but there was confusion amongst the media about just how big a deal the font was, a situation exacerbated by some of the statements that accompanied its release.

“Self-expression is an art form. Through it you share who you are, what you think of and how you feel to the world. To do so you need a medium capable of capturing the nuances of everything you have to say,” waxes the font’s website.

“The Dubai font does exactly that. It is a new global medium for self-expression. By celebrating the past and embracing the future, transcending all barriers, the Dubai font is the voice of our brave new world.”

Here was yet another example, it seemed, of a city obsessed with record-breaking reaching for yet another first with typical headline-grabbing chutzpah.

Could a font really be that important or was this yet another announcement from the Neverland that brought us asteroid-suspended skyscrapers and hyperloops designed to propel passengers across the emirates at credulity-stretching speeds?

In its race to publish the story, The Guardian failed to get to the truth of the font’s finer print.

“This article was amended on 1 May 2017,” the London-based newspaper admitted. “An earlier version included an incorrect claim that the font was the first to be developed for a city and carry its name.” 

If Dubai wasn’t the first city or even country to have a font named after it, what was going on? Was this just a headline-grabbing marketing stunt or yet another tilt at city branding designed to position Dubai as a leader in the technology sphere?

While the Dubai font represents the first typographic collaboration between the corporation and a government and is the first Microsoft typeface to be created for, and named after, a city, there is already a long list of countries and cities that have developed their own bespoke scripts.

In 2014 Sweden adopted Sweden Sans for all of its government, ministry and corporate communications while in 2010 the Office of the Brand Abu Dhabi commissioned its own Latin and Arabic fonts, which accompany the emirate’s logo on newer Abu Dhabi-registered vehicle license plates as well as in the branding for the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority.

Aesthetically, however, the approach to font design adopted by the designers of the Abu Dhabi and Dubai fonts could not be more different.

Whereas the Latin font developed for the office of the Brand Abu Dhabi attempts to ape the horizontality and shallow curves of traditional Arabic calligraphy, the Arabic and Latin scripts designed for the Dubai font by Nadine Chahine and her team at Monotype aim for parity in a situation where there is, she insists, rather more than mere aesthetics at stake.

“When I was studying graphic design in the 1990s in Beirut, the number of available Arabic typefaces was very limited and the quality was very poor,” Monotype’s UK type director and legibility expert explains.

“Lebanon is like the UAE. There are lots of bilingual publications and projects and every time we put the Arabic and the English together, the English looked very nice and the Arabic looked poor and this is not OK,” she insists, linking typographic harmony with wider issues, not just of branding and business, but of politics and Arabic identity.

“That would be a reflection on who we are and that’s not where we want to be, [but] we need to be able to speak at the same level and to have harmony and coexistence at the same level. We are not less.”

To ensure that there no concessions made in the design of the font’s Arabic script Chahine, who has designed Arabic versions of well-known Latin scripts such as Neue Helvetica, Univers and Palatino, designed the Dubai font’s Arabic version first.

“Usually the Latin is designed first but that gives you less freedom with what you can do with the Arabic, which then has to follow the Latin and so you inherit design decisions that you would not have wanted to face,” Chahine explains, aiming instead for a situation where both the Arabic and Latin typefaces achieve a harmony without aesthetic or cultural concessions.

“It’s a reflection of who we are, what we want to be and of Dubai. The foreigners here don’t have to wear local dress and the locals don’t have to wear Western dress, they all are comfortable in their own identities and they coexist,” she says, reflecting on the Dubai Executive Council’s original brief.

“It said in the brief that the Latin and Arabic should be designed together, harmoniously,” Chahine remembers. “But it was very important that we respect the heritage of each while meeting on middle ground and respecting the traditions of where we come from.”

The other key factors that determined the font’s design were that, as well as being distributed through Microsoft Office, it should be available and legible to anyone using Microsoft software – regardless of the device – and that it should also be effective regardless of its context.

“Normally when you have a brand who comes to you they usually have a specific usage in mind. They might it want it for signage or for tourist authority work or for newspaper headlines or TV and that guides your design decisions,” explains the designer, whose other fonts are already in use by local clients such as Dubai Airport, Emirates National Bank of Dubai and Emaar.

“But the fact that the Dubai font was going to ship through Microsoft Office and be for use by everyone mean that the font needed to be extremely versatile to allow different kinds of usages and that made it an extremely difficult task,” she says.

Becoming part of the Microsoft suite also meant that the new font had to be readily distinguishable from all of the other standard fonts currently available through Office, both Latin and Arabic.

“Part of the brief, design-wise, was that the type face had to very legible and easy to read and that’s why you see the simplicity of form in it, it’s not too complicated,” Chahine admits. “But it also needed to carry the voice and the vision of Dubai.”

Within days of its launch, Dubai Courts announced that it had adopted the typeface for all of its official communications as did the Dubai-based conference and events company Index Holding, becoming the first Emirati private company to use the font for its electronic communications in the process.

To understand the font’s origins, it is necessary to look back to 2015, the UAE’s self-declared Year of Innovation, explains Engineer Ahmad Al Mahri, assistant secretary general for the Executive Council and general secretariat affairs sector of Dubai.

“We were asked by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan to come up with ideas that would help to position Dubai at the forefront of innovation and a font also fitted well with the UAE’s aim of promoting Arabic and literacy, which were promoted during the UAE’s Year of Reading in 2016.”

Viewed from this perspective, the Dubai font can be understood not just as a clever publicity stunt or a sophisticated piece of place-branding but as part of an ongoing and far wider set of initiatives, which began in earnest with the launch of the UAE’s National Strategy for Innovation but also include the social media campaign, #MyDubai, both of which were launched in 2014.

Designed to help broaden public perceptions of the city while keeping it firmly in the spotlight such initiatives, which also include the forthcoming Dubai Institute of Design Innovation, a joint venture with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and New York’s Parson School of Design, are a part of the emirates’ strategic diversification effort, not just beyond oil but beyond tourism and shopping as well.

Having said that, the Dubai font also represents marketing and brand-building at its most sophisticated.

“When I heard about it I immediately wished I had thought of it,” admits Mark Rollinson, Chairman of the Abu Dhabi-based creative consultancy All About Brands.

“The idea of designing a font that has the potential to become ubiquitous in the field of digital communication and is also one of Microsoft’s default fonts is incredibly smart because it will constantly put Dubai at the front of people’s minds even if they only scroll past the font and never use it.”

The agency behind Brand Abu Dhabi and the revamped crests for Manchester City football club and the government of Abu Dhabi, All About Brands have also developed corporate identities for Abu Dhabi Airports and the UAE Space Agency, Masdar and the Yas Marina Circuit.

“On the face of it creating a font seems like a fairly small initiative but when you start seeing the numbers – 100 million people in 180 countries – it’s amazing,” he says.

“Can you imagine what you’d have to pay for an advertising campaign with that reach? I think it’s a really clever piece of marketing and whatever they had to pay for it, I think they’ll find it’s value for money.”

To put matters in perspective, Superbowl 2017 attracted 113.7 million-strong audience while the 2017 Oscar Ceremony could muster only 32.9 million viewers. 

As well as its potential ubiquity however, Rollinson also believes that the initiative has the marketing legs to move beyond the world of computing and type.

“They can start calling for poetry, writing and even design competitions where the entries have to use the font and hashtag,” the branding expert enthuses. 

“The choices to exploit the font when more than 100 million people have got it just go on and on.”

Nadine Chahine is more circumspect and refuses to be drawn on the likely fate of her new font.

“When we designed the typeface it was with the intention that it would have many usages, but only time will tell whether it has a resonance with people and whether they will want to use it,” the designer insists.

One of the things that might determine how the font is eventually embraced and adopted is the fine print of the detailed and labyrinthine terms and conditions that accompany its use.

In a bid to avoid any potential misuse these insist that the Dubai font cannot be used “in any manner that goes against the public morals of the United Arab Emirates or which is offensive or an affront to the local culture and/or values of the United Arab Emirates” and that users of the font also agree to “irrevocably submit to the jurisdiction of the Courts of the Emirate of Dubai”, clauses that sit uneasily with a project dedicated to allowing “all type users to express themselves freely to the world”.

One thing, however, is certain. The history of printing and typography is full of examples of tools and technology that have had unintended consequences their inventors could never have imagined.

Historians have credited the invention of the printing press and movable type with everything from the proliferation of books, literacy and lenses in Renaissance Europe to the creation an intellectual environment where cities, economies and intellectual revolutions could thrive.

The eventual impact of the Dubai font will be just as difficult to foresee and is likely to be just as tangential, but it would appear that for the unsuspecting, this is a free font whose use has the potential to come at a very high price.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National