Ferrari: Under The Skin - exhibition at the Design Museum

In an Italy ravaged by the Second World War, Enzo Ferrari and a small team decided to create the perfect racing machine. The exhibition at The Design Museum, London explores Ferrari’s powerful personality, the design and manufacturing process, the famous clientele and the future of the luxury car brand.

From the very first Ferrari to Michael Schumacher’s winning Formula One car and the newest hybrid model, the exhibition features rare cars and memorabilia displayed in public for the first time. The Ferrari experience is described through original hand-drawn sketches, sculpture-like models and engines, alongside films and interviews telling one of the great design stories of all time.

‘Race cars are neither beautiful nor ugly. They become beautiful when they win.’ Enzo Ferrari

125S – 1947 Replica

The first Ferrari, the 125 S, was an extraordinary achievement to be created in 1947, in an Italian economy devastated by the recent war. This is the only existing official replica, built by Ferrari in 1987 following the original design.

#FerrariFact – Enzo Ferrari was 49 years old when he created this car.

166 MM Barchetta – 1950

‘Of all the cars I have driven, I can never forget my first Ferrari’ declared Gianni Agnelli, the head of Fiat. This is his car.

The 166 MM was named after the gruelling Mille Miglia race, spanning 1,000 miles across Italy. It was also the first Ferrari to win the famous Le Mans 24 hour race, driven by Enzo Ferrari’s American agent, Luigi Chinetti in 1949 – just two years after Ferrari’s very first car was built.

Ferrari 500 F2 – 1952

Enzo Ferrari always intended to build both sports cars and also single-seat racing cars. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s he began to challenge the long-established manufacturers like Alfa Romeo and Maserati. Alberto Ascari won the Formula One championship in both 1952 and 1953 in the car and demonstrated that Ferrari had now reached the top flight of race engineering.

250 GT chassis only – 1957

In a Ferrari everything is designed and made for its special purpose. Nothing is off the shelf. This chassis forms an important exhibit within the exhibition and demonstrates the detailed design and engineering.

250 GT Cabriolet – 1957

This open car, with bodywork designed by Pininfarina, belonged to the famous British racing driver Peter Collins. He also used it as his personal transport. This represents Ferrari’s move into road cars, as well as out and out racing cars. It was even the first Ferrari to have disc brakes, developed by the British Dunlop company and which Collins persuaded Enzo Ferrari to adopt.

250 GT Berlinetta passo corto (SWB) – 1960

This was a period when sports racing cars were less specialised than today and racing successes helped Ferrari become the quintessential sports car manufacturer. Stirling Moss, a famous British racer, never raced officially for the factory, but he had several wins in privately-owned Ferraris and won the 1960 Tourist Trophy in this car.

250 GT Berlinetta passo corto ‘Sperimentale’ – 1961

This car was used as a development model by Ferrari and represents a transition between the very successful 250 GT models and the Ferrari GTO – one of the factory’s most well-known cars. It ran at Le Mans in 1961 and in 1962, driven by Stirling Moss and won at Daytona.

250 GTO – 1962

This car was masterminded by the talented engineer Giotto Bizzarini, incorporating more power, better suspension, but particularly a more modern approach to aerodynamic design to deliver stability as well as speed - and the kicked-up tail is one visible sign of this.

The Ferrari GTO is considered by Ferrari admirers to be one of the company’s most significant and iconic models. Ferrari won three successive titles with the GTO, in 1962, ‘63 and ‘64.

#FerrariFact - The GTO tag stands for Grand Turismo Omologato

275 GTB4 – 1967

The 275 GTB4 is often called the most beautiful Ferrari of all time. This car illustrates the long-term creative partnership between Ferrari and the Turin design house of Pininfarina. Originally owned by the British agents Maranello Concessionaires – a company which was important to the commercial success of Ferrari.

365 GTB4 – 1973

The 365 GTB4 aka ‘The Ferrari Daytona’ is a highly significant car in that it was one of the first Ferraris to be built in substantial numbers - over 1,400 were made. This was another clear indication of Ferrari’s development into a major international brand.

#FerrariFact - It got its second name following Ferrari’s win with 1st, 2nd and 3rd places at the Daytona 24 hour race in 1967.

Testarossa Spider – 1986

The adoption of the mid/rear engine for high-performance cars gave automotive designers a new challenge. This car illustrates how Pininfarina responded to the challenge and created a new form for these cars which still resonates in design today. The car was commissioned by Fiat chief Gianni Agnelli as a personal car and was specially modified for him by Pininfarina to be an open ‘drophead’ car.

F40 – 1988

The F40 was conceived as a special car to commemorate 40 years since the very first Ferrari – the 125 S. Enzo Ferrari suggested that the company did something special ‘the way we used to do’. It was the fastest road car available at the time.

#FerrariFact – This was the last car that Enzo Ferrari oversaw himself, as he passed away in August 1988.

Ferrari F1-2000 – 2000

With this car, Michael Schumacher was able to win his third World Drivers’ Title and Ferrari first in 21 years when he won in 2000. Ferrari has always been a major attraction in Formula One. As a driver, Schumacher was superb but he also had the skills to analyse the car’s performance, feed back to the engineers, and help integrate the team for one of its most successful periods in racing.

This combination positioned Ferrari to dominate the F1 scene for nearly half a decade.

La Ferrari Aperta – 2016

The LaFerrari is a hybrid, incorporating battery-electric technology to give a striking performance boost as well as a reduction in fuel consumption. Strenuous R&D goes into Ferrari’s road cars, which also borrows from Formula One developments.

Lamborghini creates a self healing sports car

Lamborghini has collaborated with a group of researchers from MIT to create a conceptual electric sports car, which has a carbon fibre shell that is able to repair any cracks or damages by itself.

Meaning “third millennium” in Italian, the Terzo Millennio concept is designed to offer a vision into the future of sports car design.

Composed of a carbon fibre structure, the car has the ability to “self-heal” and can conduct its own health checks using sensors to detect any cracks and damages in its substructure.

If a small crack is detected, a self-repairing process begins filling in the fissure with nanotubes – preventing the cracks from spreading any further into the car’s structure.

“Collaborating with MIT for our research and development department is an exceptional opportunity to do what Lamborghini has always been very good at – rewriting the rules on super sports cars,” said Stefano Domenicali, manager and CEO of Lamborghini.

In a bid to overcome the limits of today’s technology, the all-electric, driverless concept car is powered by supercapacitors rather than conventional batteries.

By incorporating this kind of energy storage system, the vehicle can be rapidly charged and is able to hold more power than a battery.

Mauricio Reggiani – Lamborghini’s head of research and development – said that even the highest quality regular batteries would not function in a supercar, due to their large size and weight.

But as the supercapacitors are made using carbon, they are malleable enough to be formed into the car’s body panels.

This makes the vehicle lighter in weight, while also enabling the whole car body to be used as an energy storage system.

“We are inspired by embracing what is impossible today to craft the realities of tomorrow; Lamborghini must always create the dreams of the next generation,” said Domenicali.

Each of the car’s wheels includes its own integrated electric engine, providing the full four-wheel-drive experience that the Italian luxury car manufacturer is known for.

Freed from a bulky standard engine, the designers and engineers were also given more freedom to use these futuristic technologies, whilst retaining Lamborghini’s signature visual identity.

“An example of a very strong statement is the evolution and further development of the Lamborghini typical Y-signature in the front and rear lights,” said the company.

“[The design is] based on an entirely new architecture, totally dedicated to perfecting airflow,” explained Lamborghini.

Building of the Week: Sanbao Art Museum, China.

Sanbao Art Museum is located in Sanbao village, a scenic place not far from the Central City of Jingdezhen, the porcelain capital of China. In the past decade, porcelain artists were attracted here to build their own studios. Thus a nascent, dynamic, porcelain-centric hub is thriving and magnetizing even more talents to migrate here what comes along is their great passions and dreams in inheriting the tradition of porcelain art. Most of the industries here are porcelain related, causing a highly competitive environment where it will take great ingenuity and endless efforts to be the best.

Porcelain and the Maker

There are artists, art, and places to exhibit art in Sanbao Village. The relationship between the artists and their creation is sort of romantic, like the feelings of first love between boys and girls, indirect probing, exploring, negotiating and subtle maneuvering. And the transformation in the pottery kilns is like the process of developing films, it is full of uncertainties, even though photographers projected their best imaginations onto the films before they pressed the shutter, the final results might be surprising or disappointing after the dark room. However, it was the risks and uncertainties that require every photographer to think through every detail before they press the shutter. Porcelain making is similar, it requires a lot of experience and brain power, there are always trials and errors, exploration, negotiation between the maker and his/her creation, it’s not exaggerated to say the relationship is quite romantic.

Therefore, the role of the art museum is to build an interactive space to encourage reciprocal communication between visitors and the space, both emotionally and behaviourally.

Spaces are created with a sense of mystery to trigger diverse sensation or psychological stimulation of visitors. In a wild imagination, architecture can act like A.I. robots to silently communicate with its visitors by its spaces.

Natural and artificial
Naturally, flowing creeks are sprawling through this narrow valley, streams chant every fine porcelain for thousands of years.

Artificially, the museum is a huge contrast to the natural scenes like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a huge artificial creation was burying in the natural background for years. The surface is full of moss and soil, its outline, however, is still obvious in the mountain.

Exhibited Items and Mirrored Selves
The museum is a visually linear shape, 150 meters long, but the visiting flow is actually nonlinear, visitors will have multiple choices to go. The purpose is to boost serendipity between people and spaces. Architecture can create the atmosphere with which visitors will have personal connections, once built, exhibited items will no longer be important, they will act like mirrors, visitors will be reviewing themselves through these items, and true arts are the medium to help ourselves to see the true version of ourselves, sometimes clear, others vague, sometimes real, others fake.

During the experience of the labyrinth tour, visitors can see themselves clearer and enjoy the atmosphere. For those who do not gamble, the casino becomes the perfect place to reflect on their own.

Impression and imagination
Walls, the most important part at shaping exhibition space and atmosphere, are made of rammed earth to offer a poetic feeling.

The main passage is a long transparent space, 100 meters, around it are rammed-earth walls, 4 meters high, grow from earth. Experiences vary when visitors walk through different areas, visitors will be attracted by the outstretched eaves after the woods area. The sound from the creeks will relax visitors a bit, and what lies ahead lead visitors further into the cryptic but joyful world.

Multiple choices are provided in the museum, visitors can go up and down, feel the delight stream or peaceful pond, enjoy the exhibition or relax in the corner. Different choices bring various experiences, which is an enriched relationship between porcelain designers and their creation. Every tour will be a story between visitors and the architecture, mixed of discovery, expectation, waiting, anxiety, disappointment and joy.

New and Old
Major materials used in Sanbao Art Museum, such as rammed earth, titanium zinc panels and travertine, will be eroded by time. This process of erosion is like the fermentation of wine, time gives its unique flavour.

In addition, Sanbao village naturally produces unique soil, slightly red in colour, so the continuous loam walls were built with local clay, it delivers certain familiarity and tension. All the joints were made in 1:1 samples in advance, and all the experimenting samples eventually assembled in a new landscape building.

About DL Atelier
Under the direction of principal designer Yang Liu, who is combining more than 10 years of design practice in various firms, the DL atelier is designing a diversity of spaces from 2012 based in Beijing and cities of east China.

DL atelier is the recent winner of the American Architecture Price (cultural architecture category), for the project Sanbaopeng Art Museum. Other projects of DL atelier were also selected as the winner of Architizer A+ Awards 2017 in categories of hotel, cultural and art.

Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Nouvel

The first official photographs of the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre Abu Dhabi have been released, ahead of the museum’s public opening this weekend.

A dome spans 180 metres over the huge new art museum, which officially opens to the public on 11 November 2017.

As the first outpost of the Musée du Louvre outside France, Louvre Abu Dhabi stands on the waterfront of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, a man-made island on the coast of the United Arab Emirates capital.

The building forms part of the Saadiyat Cultural District, where it will be joined by the Foster + Partner-designed Zayed National Museum and a new Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry, although work has yet to begin on that.

Almost 8,000 metal stars overlap to form the geometric pattern of the dome. It filters sunlight to create is described as “a rain of light”, throwing flecks of illumination on the white blocks and promenades that forms the building’s interior.

“It is a project founded on a major symbol of Arab architecture: the dome. But here, with its evident shift from tradition, the dome is a modern proposal,” said French architect Jean Nouvel.

“A double dome 180 metres in diameter, offering horizontal, perfectly radiating geometry, a randomly perforated woven material, providing shade punctuated by bursts of sun,” he explained.

“The dome gleams in the Abu Dhabi sunshine. At night, this protected landscape is an oasis of light under a starry dome.”

The semi-outdoor spaces below the dome are used to display specially commissioned installations, while the museum’s permanent collection and temporary shows are housed within white cubic blocks, to create a “museum city”.

A well as 6,400 square metres of gallery space – comprising 23 galleries for the museum’s permanent collection, a temporary exhibition space and the Children’s Museum – the Louvre Abu Dhabi also includes a 270-seat auditorium, restaurant, shop and cafe.

Plans were first unveiled for the museum back in in 2007, when an intergovernmental agreement between Abu Dhabi and France was formed.

Its completion comes five years after the Musée du Louvre opened its first outpost – a gallery in French town Lens designed by Japanese studio SANAA and New York office Imrey Culbert.

Building works drew to a close earlier this summer and first glimpses of the building’s completed exterior have been trickling through on social media since August.

The museum’s own collection of 600 artworks – ranging from pieces by Piet Mondrian, Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, to Cy Twombly and Ai Weiwei – will be exhibited alongside 300 pieces loaned from French cultural institutions, to present a chronological display dating from prehistory to present day.

Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Masters, London 2017

Another edition of Frieze Art Fair and Frieze Masters openes this week- here are our highlights from the fair:

BRONZE AGE c.3500BC – AD 2017: Hauser & Wirth, Frieze London

Hauser & Wirth is renowned for its unconventional booths and this year it has excelled itself with a tongue-in-cheek presentation that introduces the dusty interior of a forgotten museum - fire extinguisher and all - into the unlikely setting of a contemporary art fair.

Organised in close collaboration with eminent classics professor Mary Beard, the display focuses solely on works made in bronze. Artefacts on loan from various British museums and institutions, together with loans from private collections nationwide are mixed up with modern and contemporary bronze sculptures by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Henry Moore and David Smith - along with Marcel Duchamp’s bronze cast sink stopper, Subodh Gupta’s bronze potatoes and a cast bronze flower by Martin Creed.

These have been mischievously interspersed with “ancient” bronze objects purchased by Beard from eBay, inviting us to ponder on the magical – and confusing – power of a museum display to render even the most insignificant object precious.

Kallos Gallery London: Frieze Masters

One of the more dramatic antiquities stands at Frieze Masters is that of Kallos Gallery in London which, with its specially constructed arched colonnade and intimate niches, resembles the kind of neoclassical English country house interior designed to house a collection of trophies acquired on an aristocratic Grand Tour.

Among the stunning array of ancient objects on display is a rare and exquisitely carved Roman marble theatre mask from around the third century AD which once belonged to the politician and socialite Sir Philip Sassoon, and an enormous multibreasted torso of the Great Mother Goddess Artemis from Ephesus which dates from the first century AD.

Timothy Taylor, London: Frieze Art Fair

The London gallery has staged an impressive solo presentation by the 81-year-old Mexican artist and architect Eduardo Terrazas. The artist has not only created the 23 works on view, but also the design of the booth. Using the floor and walls like a white canvas, Terrazas has crafted geometrical shapes with blue lines, creating a space that feels as if walking inside one of his paintings.

The works, with prices ranging from £10,000 to £40,000, include acrylic pieces on canvas, works made of wool yarn on wooden board, and four vintage drawings from 1974. This overview of the oeuvre of a founding member of Mexico’s contemporary art scene strikes the perfect balance between art historical pieces and very recent works.

Travesía Cuatro – Madrid, Guadalajara

Few booths were more eye-catching than Travesía Cuatro’s phenomenal group presentation featuring the works of Charlie Billingham, Mateo López, Gonzalo Lebrija, Elena del Rivero, and Jose Dávila.

The mix of British, Spanish, Mexican, and Colombian artists did really pop against Billingham’s stencilled wallpaper, priced at £10,000. The young London-based artist is also showing a number of satirical paintings (with prices ranging from £6,000 to 13,000) that draw inspiration from politicized illustrations in the style of William Hogarth.

Billingham’s composition complemented the geometrical canvases and texturized sculptures of his Latin-American counterparts. Prices for their works ranged from $5,000 for a Lebrija piece to $75,000 for a work by Dávila.

Cezanne Portraits at The National Portrait Gallery, London

This major international exhibition brings together for the first time over fifty of Cézanne’s portraits from collections across the world, including works which have never been on public display in the UK.

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is one of the most influential artists of the nineteenth century and his unique method of building form with colour and analytical approach to nature influenced the art of Cubists, Fauvists, and successive generations of avant-garde artists.

Over a working life of some forty-five years, Cézanne made almost 1,000 paintings of which around 160 are portraits. The exhibition will offer a unique and fascinating insight into this central aspect of his work, highlighting the special pictorial and thematic characteristics of his portraiture including his creation of complementary pairs and different versions of the same subject.

The exhibition will also consider the extent to which particular sitters shaped the development of his practise. Paintings on display will range from multiple portraits of himself and his wife, Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s remarkable portrayals of his Uncle Dominique, dating from the 1860s, through to his final portraits of the gardener Vallier, who helped in his studio at Les Lauves, Aix-en-Provence.