Jonathan Ive you know. One of his best friends, Marc Newson, might not be quite as familiar a name to you. Newson is also a world-class designer. The two are collaborating for the first time for an auction to benefit Bono’s Product (Red) anti-H.I.V. campaign. Vanity Fair interviewed them both.
In an effort that is part connoisseurship, part creativity, and part curatorship, the two designers have assembled a group of more than 40 objects that will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on November 23 to benefit Product (Red), the eccentrically punctuated charity set up by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006 to support international efforts to fight the H.I.V. epidemic in Africa. Two one-of-a-kind pieces—a metal desk and a special Leica camera—were designed by Ive and Newson in collaboration, specially for the auction. Several others, like a customized Steinway grand piano and a Georg Jensen silver pitcher, are variations on existing objects that Ive and Newson both liked and got the manufacturers to agree to tweak for the sale, generally by adding something red. (The Steinway appears to be entirely white, but when you lift its lid, the underside turns out to be painted an intense, brilliant red, while the pitcher has a red enameled interior.) A few other items, such as a circa-1990 Russian cosmonaut’s space suit and a sketch for one of Elvis Presley’s stage costumes from 1970, are objects Ive and Newson found and decided that they liked well enough to include in the auction as is.
On obsession with detail and commitment to design:
“We are both fanatical in terms of care and attention to things people don’t see immediately,” Ive said. “It’s like finishing the back of a drawer. Nobody’s going to see it, but you do it anyway. Products are a form of communication—they demonstrate your value system, what you care about.”
On the one-of-a-kind Leica camera the pair designed for the auction:
The camera is based on the Leica Digital Rangefinder and was manufactured by that company as a custom item. The overall shape is similar to a conventional camera’s, but the finished object looks altogether different. It is made of brushed aluminum, and the controls are sleek and understated, as on Ive’s products for Apple. It does everything the regular Leica does, with the same lenses and the same functions, but the controls no longer seem intrusive, like silver barnacles on a black metal beast. Instead, every button and every lever is a tiny sensual moment, subsumed into the overall form of the camera. Never a thing of beauty, the Leica has become one by being boiled down to its essence.
“I found it a very odd and unusual thing to put this amount of love and energy into one thing, where you are only going to make one,” Ive said. “But isn’t it beautiful?” The camera’s dollar worth is hard to estimate, since it is an art piece as much as a functioning object, but the value of the time Ive, Newson, and Leica’s own engineers put into it probably totals well into six figures, and possibly seven. The process of designing and making the camera took more than nine months, and involved 947 different prototype parts and 561 different models before the design was completed. According to Apple, 55 engineers assisted at some part in the process, spending a collective total of 2,149 hours on the project. Final assembly of the actual camera took one engineer 50 hours, the equivalent of more than six workdays, all of which makes Ive’s comment to me that he thought the Leica might bring $6 million seem not so far-fetched.
Good read, especially if you are into design.
