RIDA
We are delighted to see that the interior design profession is settling in more and more each day in Romania. The creation of RIDA (Romanian Interior Design Association) is a notable milestone in this process and was celebrated last evening through the opening ceremony hosted in the generous spaces of the Bucharest Delta Studio showroom. We salute this initiative and are honored to be a part of this community.
In case you want a glimpse into last nights’ event, just imagine design, spice and everything nice; an immense showroom filled with nice furniture and tiles, fine wine and dine and all the fuss and fuzz built up by having nearly 100 designers gathered in one space. Among which, of course, the one Karim Rashid. We very much enjoyed his speech and felt like sharing some of the ideas he expressed in it.
As he nicely stated, in the past 20 years, the profession of design evolved and gained an important place in the lives of all people. He underlined the difference between an interior designer and a decorator. The interior designer/ architect goes deep into questioning the why more than the how of things around us; why we use the spaces the way we do, how we sit on a chair, or in a bus station. Only by asking these questions can one start to attend to the need that generates a product or a space. A decorator would not address issues so profoundly, instead they would just make it pretty. And I am not saying this to throw shade or undermine the importance of the latter. However, I believe it is healthy to define and distinguish one from the other.
Furthermore, Mr. Rashid discusses the idea of kitsch vs authenticity. If we can define kitsch as a cheap replica of the original, does that make all the replica furniture we use in our projects kitsch? Does that mean that any time we “steal” an idea, or get inspired by something we create kitsch? Sometimes we may find ourselves taking credit for a great idea of something that has been stored in our visual memory banks from a google search we did three months ago, says Mr. K.
Ultimately, he said the key to creating originality lies in going through the design process thoroughly, starting from the root of observing human behavior- as opposed to acce
pting the paradigm of we do things this way just because this is how we always have. And in order to be observant we must Be. BE PRESENT. And right he is. As a seeker and a yogi padawan myself I can add that it is not always easy to do so. But it is our duty to t
ry continuously.
So thank you @RIDA for bringing
Mr. Karim Rashid to Romania and into this community. May his spark ignite our minds and hearts in creating functional beauty and bettering this world to the best of our abilities.