English Culture IV - Jonathan Ive

Jonathan Paul Ive, is an English designer and the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

As senior vice-president of design at Apple, Jonathan Ive has combined what he describes as “fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff” with relentless experiments into new tools, materials and production processes, to design such ground-breaking products as the iMAC, iBook, the PowerBook G4 and the iPod MP3 player. He won the Design Museum's first Designer of the Year prize for the 2002 iMac and iPod.

Born in London in 1967, Ive studied art and design at Newcastle Polytechnic before co-founding Tangerine, a design consultancy where he developed everything from power tools to televisions. In 1992, one of his clients – Apple – offered him a job at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. Working closesly with Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, Ive developed the iMac. As well as selling more than 2m units in its first year, the iMac transformed product design by introducing colour and light to the drab world of computing where, until its arrival, new products were encased in opaque grey or beige plastic.

Ive and his close-knit team of designers at Apple have since applied the same lateral thinking and passionate attention to detail to the development of equally innovative new products such as the Cube, the iPod and the PowerBook G4, the world’s lightest and slimmest 17 inch laptop, and the ultra-slim iMac G5.

In my opinion this English designer has a fantastic and innovate work. It is a exceptional and exemplary work in the design of consumer goods, technology and furniture and it can transform the look of any workplace.

http://designmuseum.org/design/jonathan-ive

English Culture IV - Norman Foster

“Norman Robert Foster, (born 1 June 1935) is a British architect whose company maintains an international design practice. He is Britain's most prolific builder of landmark office buildings. In 2009 Foster was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in the Arts category.

He was one of the architects who turned things around by proving that to make good buildings, it would not be necessary to abandon the principles of Modernism—clear structure, lucid forms—but simply to apply them with new rigor and imagination.

During the past 25 years, Foster has been the architect behind some of the most famous additions to the global skyline, including the Swiss Re headquarters in London that everybody calls the Gherkin and the Hearst Tower in New York City. Above all, he has been a pioneer among green architects. His headquarters for the Commerzbank in Frankfurt, completed in 1997, was the first ecologically correct office tower, with a central atrium that features multistory gardens that create natural ventilation. Foster doesn't merely prove that great architects can be great designers. He proves that they can be good citizens too.”

In my opinion Foster is a great architect and he has a excellent talent/skills and his buildings shows well this talent. The buildings are fantastic and they are a modern vision.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1647860_1647834_1644309,00.html

English Culture IV - Henry Moore

Henry Moore was the most celebrated sculptor of his time, he demonstrated that Modernist sculpture was, after all, surprisingly adaptable to official needs. In this sense, Moore was the contemporary equivalent of the great Neo Classical sculptors such as Canova and Thorwaldsen.
He was best known for his abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art.
His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a mining engineer. He became well-known through his larger-scale abstract cast bronze and carved marble sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom. His ability in later life to fulfil large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Yet he lived frugally and most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.
Through my research on this artist, he is a central figure in the history of modern sculpture. Henry Moore was rated by some as the last of the old and by others as the first of the young.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/moore.html
http://www.revistamuseu.com.br/galeria.asp?id=6828

English Culture IV - Damien Hirst

Damien Steven Hirst (born 1965) is an English artist and the most prominent member of the group known as "Young British Artists" . He is internationally renowned, and is reputed to be the richest living artist to date.

Damien Hirst’s wide-ranging practice – installations, sculpture, painting and drawing – has sought to challenge the boundaries between art, science and popular culture. His energy and inventiveness, and his consistently visceral, visually arresting work, has made him a leading artist of his generation.

Hirst explores the uncertainty at the core of human experience; love, life, death, loyalty and betrayal through unexpected and unconventional media. Best known for the ‘Natural History’ works, which present animals in vitrines suspended in formaldehyde such as the iconic, his works recast fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence."

For me this artist has a very special sens of the life and everything is a reason to make art. The life is art.

http://gataescondida.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/damien_hirst-shark-1.jpg

http://www.whitecube.com/artists/hirst/