Interview with Michal Maciej Bartosik

Over the course of my architectural career I became increasingly preoccupied with questions surrounding the 'Detail'. The Detail in my opinion is the cultural sinew between idea and material expression. It became evident to me that architecture, most often, does not afford itself the necessary time to sublimate the detail beyond a solely functional operation. The compressed scale at which industrial design contemplates the detail makes its ambitions central to these questions - What is the innate spirit of any given detail?

I don't really see much of a distinction one from the other. When you are confronted with a conduit of Ideas and purposefully enter into its stream, the question of choice or control becomes an unnecessary distraction to the process of making.

Embrace failure! Develop a casual rapport with failure. Failure is an intrinsic part of the creative process. Most importantly, its companionship affords one to work well out of their bounds of comfort. Failure is a transformative agent disguised as trepidation. Its the necessary counterpoint to the soporific nature of doing what we already know.

The constant and uninterrupted process of iteration in thought and execution.

I more or less never tire of Mies van der Rohe's body of work.

Junya Ishigami's Table which he designed in 2006. Imagine an unsupported table that is 9.5m long and 2.6m wide and only 3mm thick. The singular pieces of steel used in its construction was pre-stressed so that the table evens out under its own weight. What results is a material twining of form and function; A table whose legs struggle to keep it from lifting off and rolling up into mechanical memory; tracing the forces of gravity enacting upon it.

I feel designers should only present their work in its built form. Computer renderings have become an unfortunate short hand that circumvents the very essence of design: the material construction of an object.

I am not certain that it does. Take the 'Hippo water roller' for example. Its an ingeniously simple design which lessens the physical burden necessary to access clean drinking water by pushing the rolling tank of water on the ground with a simple handle. Nevertheless, its design responds to preexisting global inequalities which you would think that by the 21st Century we, as a society, would have already resolved. Too often, design defers us from asking the more difficult questions.

I feel very comfortable with burying the germ of an idea as far back into my mind as possible. It sits there for months often years. This way we familiarize ourselves with one another. Upon recall, it often returns with a better understanding of its own logic then I would have been able to instill upon it.
This is often the fertile moment for the work to begin.

Design as though to bring your epoch to an end. -Before it ends you.

I think design sets trends. Trends merely produce replicas.

Technology plays an important role in both the development and execution of any give design. When I feel ready, an idea or hunch I may have is often translated into a digital model. It undergoes a process of exploration and is then translated into a crude physical model so to subject it to real senses and forces. I often iterate this way, between the digital and physical, and finally set it into production through CAD/CAM channels.

When I come across something really well designed it often provokes an emotional reaction. It's at this moment I feel as though I have come across something very special. Its one thing to be impressed, and something entirely different to be moved.

Visual Artists and Architects.

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott is a recent favorite of mine. Quadrivium and The power of limits are two works I also find myself returning to frequently.

Awards are an important part of my design process. They serve as a general cultural gauge for my work's relevance in a broader context. I am both encouraged and honored by the accolades I have received to date.

When I was a child, I was fleeing communism. My creative output at the time, most likely for that precise reason, was unrelenting.

The question of 'what is design is for you?' seems as intangible as asking 'what is god to you?'
the closest I can come to an answer is a text I once read by Yehuda E. Safran in an obscure publication where he describes the pursuit of the master builder as being one which 'betters their relationship with their own consciousness'.

The ones that can be physically built. In the last decade, the pervasive nature of sketchup and online rendering software has produced a lexicon of virtually 'made' objects which appear increasingly common on design blogs and as entries into design competitions as stand ins for physical objects. Talent aside, this may explain why 'real' objects are increasingly poorly made and how we increasingly associate touch with the virtual world and not our own. I'm a proponent of physical abstraction, but I like to be able to touch my abstractions.

I find design successful when it is allowed to take its own shape. When the designer affords the project the necessary space for it to come into its own. In this way it becomes idiomatic, unconstrained by style; the project has learnt its own logic and begins to have a voice in the process of its own making.

Most recently, I had the opportunity to exhibit at the Design Exchange in Toronto. A two part exhibition titled 'Playing Favourites' which surveyed contemporary Canadian design along side some of the country's most iconic and notable design contribution from the not so distant past. Currently I am working towards a solo exhibition in Ostrava, Czech Republic, which will focus on varying iterations of tensegrity light systems. All this to say that I think it is important to maintain a national and international public discourse about design beyond its commercial success.

I’m always trying to represent an idea as simply as possible which I think comes from a desire to produce clarity. My work is an experiment in the tectonics of ideas and their built form. Most often it's a matter of endurance, having to think an idea through to its natural conclusion.
This of course never happens in any linear fashion. I think one has to trust themselves and in someway concede to their subconscious, that somewhere beneath the thousand of banal ideas and decisions we make on a daily basis is an uninterrupted undertow of creativity that forms this 'thing' we are trying to make at a given moment. Then suddenly, like the prodigal son, it appears before us in the check out aisle.

The process in my work most resembles that of applying the scientific method. It begins with a Question; what do I want to achieve through the art of making?, the Hypothesis; how can it be achieved, the Procedure; what variables best describe it, and finally the Experiment; the design itself, the process of trying to make a 'thing'.

I’m always trying to challenge my abilities and it’s essential that there is always room for things to fail. I think that’s what makes designing interesting: pursuing the chance of an idea being successful. One of my earliest fluorescent light domes was once called a ‘spectacular failure’ which I always preferred over it being potentially called a mediocre success.

There never seems to be any time left to manage after designing. At the same time there doesn't seem to be any time left after the internet either, so all this feel quite natural.

There are numerous works and commissions in various stages of progress. I also try to maintain an active practice of submitting work to design competitions to test their relevancy in a broader cultural context. This in turn pushes their design to a level of near completion in a relatively short period of time, while teasing out qualities specific to the call that I had not previously considered. Most recently I submitted one of two chairs I have been developing in the back of my mind for several years to the Battery Park 'Draw up a chair' competition. Out of 679, 'The Battery Park Pretzel Chair' made it through to the first selection of 50 finalist which to me warrants its further development and eventual production. It remains a pretzel, sadly without the battery.

mmbartosik@gmail.com