SHOW TIME
BD EDICIONES
2006
Jaime Hayón
LAS SANTAS
METALARTE
2008
The clearest sign that Spanish
design has arrived on a global scale?
Hayón’s colorful furniture and lighting products for Barcelona-based
companies use contemporary industrial processes to produce pared-down
modern forms that subtly suggest a
rootedness in the culture. The Las
Santas lamp series for Metalarte is
made of porcelain with a Dalí-esque
fluidity between base and stem. The
rotational-molded Showtime armchair and hooded chair use a bright,
monochromatic palette to counter
their minimalist curves.
BASTONE GRANDE
METALARTE
2008
SHOWTIME
BD EDICIONES
2006
Or from Spain, for that matter. The hottest
Spanish designers today are Patricia Urquiola and
Jaime Hayón, but for more than 20 years Urquiola’s
home has been in Italy; and Hayón has lived outside
the country for almost a decade, at first in Treviso,
Italy, where in 1998, at the age of 24, he rose to the
position of design director at Fabrica before being
reclaimed by Barcelona and spit into the sky like a
supernova. He now lives in London, where he nonetheless remains loyal—by exclusive contract—to
a handful of Spanish companies that greedily covet
his new lighting, furniture, and outdoor collections
each year. But both Hayón and Urquiola benefited
from the emergence of a vibrant culture of contemporary design in Spain, drawing on its two main
traditions—extravagance and minimalism—and
merging them in a fluid style that speaks a global
language with a distinct local accent.
Much of the imaginative infrastructure for their
success was set up in the frenetic years between
Franco’s death and the entry of Spain into the
European Economic Community (now the European Union) in 1986, when an eclectic group of
countercultural artists and designers known as La
Movida (most famous among them was the
flamboyant director Pedro Almódovar) was busy
compensating for missing out on the social movements of the 1960s with a redoubling of its creative
output, sexual experimentation, and drug use.
“After the dictatorship, many people started to do
magazines, design, shop, and contact people, going
outside of Spain,” says Juli Capella, an architect
who has been the period’s main curator, critic,
collector, and disseminator of information about
