Every competition has its own particular characteristics, its own thematic orientation and, over time, develops its own tradition and reputation. TITAN in contrast is new, launched for the first time in 2008 but with no lesser degree of ambition than to carve out its own particular identity.
The original impetus for the competition comes from the ESAD College of Arts and Design and the fact of being a design school has orientated the kind of search that the competition represents. At the core of the schools’ philosophy is a belief in design as a social tool, with all the cultural resonance that this implies. Moreover, we understand that in order to be an effective tool design must also be a process; of thinking, of collaborating and often of imagining, in short, a process that turns ideas into actions, concepts into reality. We strive to encourage a practice that is capable of generating a physical and visual world which expresses our society’s deepest needs and desires.
It is for these reasons that our attention is drawn to the ways in which the special skills of image making - drawing upon unique interpretation and vision - combine with other graphic and visual languages to create narratives and identities. Thus TITAN is concerned, not simply with illustration as a self contained practice but with the fusion of illustration and design.
We thought long and hard about the categories that would best encompass our objectives. Our belief in the promotion of a vibrant design culture, applied in social practice, led us to create categories which gravitate around notions of doing rather than a more conventional list of form-based areas. Needless to say, although forms of categorisation may influence our perceptions - which is a good thing in itself - the search always returns to ideas expressed through the taking of form.
Regardless of categories therefore, our most profound concern is to attract work of excellence that reflects the diverse and ever expanding domain of contemporary image making. That such excellence exists we have no doubt. Through TITAN we aim to celebrate it and its authors and most importantly, to take it to a larger public.
Andrew Howard
Head of Jury
Director Master in Design ESAD
(Comunication & Multimédia Group)
Established in 1989, ESAD - college of arts and design is a private college, which gradually has won its space as a reference of quality in education, research and dynamization level in the field of arts and design.
ESAD confers graduations e post-graduate studies, perfectly adequate to Bologne directives in areas of Design – with specialization in Communication, Product, Interiors and Fashion – and Arts – with specialization in Jewelry, Digital Arts and Multimedia. Structured in two years, the ESAD’s Master in Design guarantees the acquisition of conceptual and project management references that allow the sedimentation and the specialised development of knowledge and skills acquired in the graduate courses in Design and Arts. Investing in quality education, ESAD reflects, however, the conscience that schools, beside institutions conferred of academic degrees should assume themselves as education institutions in the true meaning of the word, as communicating platforms between civil community, industry and market. Reflecting that spirit, ESAD develops an activity open to community – it’s clear by the large number of people external to school that go to the events organized by ESAD – attentive to synergy exploration which result from the development of projects in partnership with other institutions and companies, from the nearest ones, such as Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos or RAR Imobiliária, to the furthest ones, such as Schools in Poland or Estonia with which ESAD has cooperation and exchange programs.
The recognition of the national and international level quality of work developed by the ESAD results in three main factors. In first place, the quality of education ministered in ESAD. This quality translates a permanent care in update study plans; a strict selection of the teaching staff; an adequate equipment of means, which assures the quality of education in areas where the technological component is essential. From these results, the education of professionals extremely qualified, suitable to respond to the companies’ needs and to create their own companies; suitable to develop projectual work and to develop research work; also suitable to respond to the education needs in areas in which they graduated. The quality of education reflects itself in awards received by students of ESAD and in the success in which ESAD ex students continued a professional career in national and international success companies, such as, Drop, DSType, Boca do Lobo ou the north-american IDEO.
In second place, the intense extracurricular activity developed in ESAD. The workshops, conferences and exhibitions which ESAD organizes, mark, without a doubt, the artistic and projectual culture in Portugal. The cycle of conferences Personal Views, coordinated by Andrew Howard, is an event of important international prestige, which has brought in the last three years the most important names of worldwide communication design, such as Neville Brody, Eric Spikerman, Ellen Lupton, Jon Wozencroft, Steven Heller, Katherine McCoy and others of a long list. Other important conferences brought other influential names, between Portuguese designers (Siza Vieira, Henrique Cayatte, Nuno Portas, Paulo Cunha e Silva, etc.) and foreigner designers (Paolo Deganello, Art Chantry, Enzo Mari, etc.). It is also important to say that dynamic work that the school develops at editorial level, of which is an example the recently released book, “Paolo Deganello: As Razões do Meu Projecto Radical”.
In third place, the research projects. ESAD defends an active partnership politic with national and international industrial companies. Inside these companies, cooperation with VOLVO in the production of a cabin for a truck and a project with the presence of Mauricio Vogliazzo e Lecio Guardini were pointed out. Other partnerships were made with Philips and more recently with Electrolux (in designing a worldwide project), Nokia (with the mobile phones’ Project for the fourth generation) and Leica, which its partnership resulted in choosing a student project to incorporate the wide brand portfolio. Positioning in the vanguard in design education, ESAD incorporates in its installations a Research Office in Industrial Design (INDI), which develops new products in direct partnership with national and international companies, and a Office in Communication and Projects (GCP), that aims at establishing the school’s internal and external communication, whether on the relations with its students and teachers level or on the connection with the outside, encouraging the development of projects and guaranteeing their organisation, production and promotion.
Participating in programs such as Leonardo and Erasmus, ESAD continues a politic of permanent opening to exchanges with other national and international institutions, which brings to ESAD Italian, French, Irish, Canadian or Brazilian students, taking ESAD students to the four corners of the world.
At a building, especially built for this purpose, with 5000m2 of crown density, ESAD develops its aspiring mission – educate, improve, innovate – oriented for a spirit where the valorization of arts and design reflects an attentive look on the reality in which ESAD integrates itself and the willingness to always contribute to make a better reality.
At the right moment did the City Hall of Matosinhos associate to the challenge posed by ESAD – College of Arts and Design in the creation of the International Competition of Illustration in Design.
It was an innovative project that chook Design and Illustration’s national scene, and even international (considering the significant numbers involved), allowing a strong prominence to these two areas of the artistic production.
It is not difficult to understand the choice of the name TITAN. It is a name that makes the competition and its image completely inseparable from the city of Matosinhos. Thus is established a relation of proximity and intimacy between the competition and the city that welcomes it, for so the history of Matosinhos doesn’t part from these giants – the Titans – that moulded the image, the design, of what is today the Leixões Port and the city that houses it.
Dr. Guilherme Pinto
The Mayor
As the ancient port of Rhodes, which had its entrance, a giant bronze statue of Apollo (one of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), Matosinhos and also the port of Leixoes have their “jumbo” metal. Are two. One out of water. Unique in the world, the “titans” are two monumental cranes that document in a privileged time of the architecture of iron and steam power. They are also key witnesses of their own construction of the port - the largest engineering project carried out in Portugal in the nineteenth century. It was, after all, thanks to its strength and its advanced sea decided that the piers Leixoes were finally built at the end of the nineteenth century.
It was on July 13, 1884, after centuries of projects, uncertainties, dreams, obstacles and utopias, which began the construction of the artificial port of Leixoes. Designed by engineer Nelson Smith, the port was built by French company “Dauderni et Duparchy” who had won the international competition (it was the only one to compete!), With a value embodied in the award, for the time, whopping $ 4 million and 489 mil reis. And despite the complexity of it would appear that the construction of the port, the deadlines have been met: after the provisional acceptance in 1892, the final was in 1895. On the basis of the success of these works are several factors. Two of them, however, are incontrovertible: the dual of the giant steam-powered cranes - the “titans” - which, block after block were erected on the seabed and the rocky jetties that defined the artificial harbor.
Indeed, the construction of the artificial harbor mostly consisted of the formation of a large bay, about 95 hectares, bounded by the construction of two large walls or piers, the north side to 1579 meters and on the south by 1147. In these walls were also built in the far north of the pier, a breakwater which, amounting to only one meter above the zero level, prolonged in a few hundred meters of one wall.
For the construction of artificial breakwaters was used for granite quarries nearby, the most important of which was that of Mount St. Gens (Custóias) that saw the Leixões linked by a line of railway, about seven miles long, built expressly for that purpose.
After the arrival of the stones at workshops and mounted in Matosinhos (to support the construction of the south pier) and da Palmeira (for the North Pier), these were then worked conglomerate and leading to the huge granite blocks that formed the walls and which reached an altitude of 50 tonnes. This weight, although impractical for handling these blocks in the work, was a guarantee of future stability and strength of the piers against the ferocity of the sea. But it was indeed a problem. How to proceed to carry, lift and then deposit the desired location the highly burdensome granite blocks? For a large problem only a solution “Titanic”.
In order to resolve this issue at a construction company, the “Dauderni & Duparchi, commissioned the famous French workshops” Fives “in Lille, two giant cranes and powerful iron steam-powered, going to also run on. Cranes, for its colossal aspect immediately were baptized by “titans”.
Mounted Leixões and addressed during the early years only by the French coach Lecrit, these powerful cranes have proved effective as fundamental in the construction of the port. It was thanks to his action that the two piers were gradually, block after block, advancing sea. Steam-powered (it is still possible to see at the top the “engine room”, with their boilers), the Titans were in fact used in the construction of the port itself It is not, contrary to what most people think, cranes for loading and unloading goods, although they later also played these roles (the South Pier at least until the ‘60s of the twentieth century).
After the construction of jetties the Titans continued to be used for repairs of the walls, following damage caused by the action stormy sea. Moreover, the Titan North Pier was, too, the protagonist of a very strong storm occurred on the night of 22 to 23 December 1892, falling to the sea. About this event reflected Alberto Pimentel in 1893: “It is easily tamed the ocean, does not change, without having to overcome great difficulties, the spontaneous work of nature. But science, engineering, hydraulics, entrusted to its powerful features, would enter the fight with the ocean and was sure to beat him, not without violent skirmishes and frequent conflicts with so worthy opponent. For its part, the sea was rolling the tooth to hydraulic, sought to recover the land that it conquered science, and, despite being clocked is still not resigned to defeat, even occasionally, as happened last year , is hurtling into rage against the port of Leixoes to undo it”.
Just three years later, in spring 1896, and after much study and effort, one can recover the titans of the sea, with the aid of powerful mechanical monkeys based on barges. Quickly recovered, the giant crane then takes up their activity.
Regardless of the meaning that the Titans are for the history of Leixoes and throughout the region, they have increasing importance for its value as privileged witnesses of the industrial and architectural / machinery of iron. Importance increased as the fact that, apparently, to deal with individual pieces in the world. In fact, it is true that the two titans of Leixoes had other siblings, the fact remains that in other cases, completion of the port building, these giants of iron have been dismantled. And when that happened, particularly in Europe, the first and second world war took care of the destruction taking into account that, early in the seaports were priority targets for bombing.
We know of more titans, as is the case of Glasgow (Scotland), or others in New Zealand, Algeria and in some South American ports. They are, however, size and lower power, unable to raise the power of steam and the iron strength of 50 tons titans Leixões raised.
More than a century after their assembly, the giant cranes remain and resist on the piers have built, including two titanic statues erected to the memory of the pioneering days of the construction of the port. The importance they possessed in connection with the establishment of the port, its grandeur and power, the symbolic value that, for over a century, have created around themselves, and their importance as heritage monuments in the world only makes them the “giants” of Leixoes.
Joel Cleto
Archeologist, Matosinhos City Hall
TITAN is an ancient mark. Common in the ports of the second half of the 19th century, the only survivors are in Leixões. From cranes, to port symbols taken over by the city of Matosinhos, they travel around the world once more, now as a prize and a competition name.
The initiative from Matosinhos City Hall and ESAD beyond the national scale singularity and its international relevance, is very important in the affirmation of the port of Leixões’ social responsibility.
It is more and more the ports’ responsibility to assert an image of contemporaneity. This is done through a daily respect for the urban community that takes us in, but it is also done by the exceptionality of finding new audiences and new courses.
João Pedro Matos Fernandes
President of the Port Authority of Douro and Leixões
IDENTITY
www.artgraphics.ru/
NET DIVER
www.netdiver.net/
WOLDA
www.wolda.org/
DIGITAL TEMPLE
www.digital-temple.com/
FORM
www.form.de/
ZUPI
www.zupi.com.br/
DESIGN COLLECTOR
www.designcollector.net/
SHIFT JAPAN
www.shift.jp.org/
DIRTYCHEAP MAG
www.dirtcheapmag.com/
