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POSTMODERNISM
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Anything
- everything goes
Pluralism, humour & chaos |
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‘Functional
architecture has proved to be a wrong road, just like painting
with a ruler. With giant strides we are approaching impractical,
unusable, and finally uninhabitable architecture… And only
after things have been creatively covered with mould, from
which we have much to learn, will a new and wonderful architecture
come into being.’
Friedrich Hundertwasser
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Ettore
Sottsass
Room divider 1981 |
Memphis,
The New International Style provided a stylistic antidote
to austere modernism in the first exhibition of the Memphis
group in 1981. For them, decoration and styling was a game.
As they said at the time, their aim was to introduce
colour and decoration in order to create objects and interiors
that enriched the imagination -and were exciting to look
at.
Functionalism and the ongoing rationalist design in architecture
had lost its appeal. The austere aesthetic of ‘less is more’
was sounding more like ‘less is a bore’. What had happened to
personality and imagination among all this homogeneity? Modernist
design had produced inner city buildings that all looked the
same and were socially detrimental in their uniformity.
The plain, box-like International style of city
buildings was becoming anachronistic, out of place in times
of increasing individualism. The belief in Modernist certainty
- a single, ordered approach which had driven design for much
of the century, paralleling the forward development of technology
and the modern world, was challenged by Postmodernism.
The revival of irrational and individual forms of expression
occurred simultaneously in the 70s. In Barcelona, young Spanish
designers revived expressionism. With Postmodernism, wittiness
reigned, and poking fun at previous design styles became a style
in itself.
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Javier Marisal
Hilton trolley
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Javier
Marisal, formerly a cartoonist, developed eccentric designs
that express the irony and irreverence of cartoons. Invited
by Sottsass to exhibit with the Memphis group in 1981, he designed
a drinks trolley. Lampooning the tradition of functionalism
in his use of art deco streamlining in his design, Marisal gave
it aerodynamic form and a sleek, dynamic appearance to convey
speed. This in turn evokes an image of patrons pursuing the
trolley around the restaurant...
The development of Postmodernism was part of a general shift
in design away from a focus on problem solving and improvement,
towards a wider engagement with the world of imagination, with
ideas, humour and visual excitement.
Design had become synonymous with good taste and
consumer appeal and was an international rather than national
trend; trade shows such as the Milan Triennale fostering
this new international style which combined the simplicity of
form of the Bauhaus with styles borrowed from across the world.
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George
Sowden
cabinet |
The
geometric style of the Bauhaus inspired Minimalism during the
60s and 70s, ousting the streamline forms of the 50s. Pop design
was a reaction against the concept of ‘good’ design decreed
by the architects and designers of modernism. While Pop concentrated
on a crossover between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ design, using popular
imagery drawn from comics and advertising (as emblems of consumer
culture), the other design trends of Minimalism and Op art continued
modernist theory along more extreme geometric lines.
In
Italy, a radical design movement developed whose members were
anti-design in that they were more revolutionaries than just
stylistic innovators. They emerged at a time of mass strikes
and student riots in Europe. Their design ideas were a mix of
philosophy, artforms and industrial manufacturing. Rejecting
the aesthetics then driving design in Italy, of technology and
functionalism, these groups embraced decoration, using it to
provoke new meanings in the objects they produced.
In 1976 the Studio Alchimia was formed in Milan (Alchemy: the
transformation of base metals into gold). Alchimia developed
further the pop trend of anti-design in the late 60s, creating
conceptual ideas of Banal design that they spread through exhibitions
and publications. They believed that design is all about surface,
and they played games with decoration as a subversive attack
on the prevailing notions of ‘good taste’. The group’s rejection
of consumerism precluded any large scale production of their
designs, because they believed quantity was banality.
Mixing modernism with mysticism and the banality of daily life,
Studio Alchimia gained international exposure at the Venice
Biennale in 1980. Its members included Ettore Sottsass,
and Alessandro Mendini who was the editor of Modo Magazine (a
design journal) and the group’s chief theorist.
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Allesandro Mendini
Proust armchair
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Mendini’s
‘Proust armchair’ was the first of the group’s forays into kitsch
and banal as inspirations for design. A reproduction
of a typical armchair, which through surface decoration Mendini
turned into some kind of exotic flower, the chair was a banal
object that became kitsch or beautiful -the assumptions of good
or bad taste became ambiguous with the clever associations conjured
up by the title of the piece. ‘Proust’ referred to Marcel Proust,
a turn of the century French writer who presented the theory
that time is in continual flux, the past being as relevant as
the present, and that the only way to understand time was through
intuitive memory.
Mendini hand painted the fabric covering his chair
in patterns reminiscent of Impressionist brush strokes, suggesting
the period when Proust, an invalid, was writing. The pattern
also was a metaphor representing the writer because he owned
Impressionist paintings.
This idea of time in flux, the past being as relevant as the
present, was to become a central feature of Postmodernism, as
design styles of the past were combined with contemporary materials
and ideas to create an inspirational, at times riotous mix of
stylistic anarchy.
A direct challenge to the formal austerity of Modernism,
the new movement reinstated historicism as a theme and revived
decoration and the exuberant forms of art nouveau, combining
them with everything else. It was now fashionable to place bright
plastic laminates next to expensive wood veneers, mixing materials
for visual effect.
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Archizoom
Associati
Dream Bed 1967 |
Another
group called Archizoom Associati, drawing their inspiration
from surrealism, designed fantasy furniture and visionary environments
in a move away from the current preoccupation in design with
consumerism and ‘high style’.
Their contemporaries Superstudio, rejected
the idea of a designed environment, proposing an empty room
to give the inhabitants maximum flexibility.
‘…to
continue to design furniture, objects, and similar household
articles was not the solution to the problems of living nor
to those of life itself…no beautification was sufficient to
remedy the ravages of time, the mistakes of man, and the beastliness
of architecture…The problem thus was one of becoming ever
more detached from these design activities, perhaps adopting
the technique of minimum effort in a general reductive process.’
They
proposed the removal of commodity-based culture and saw the
future of cities as anonymous, standardised, never-ending structures
that would spread out over the planet. Their concept of anonymity
in future design was expressed in their exhibitions of structures
covered in rectangular patterns of lines, Constructed of plywood
and chipboard, covered with plastic and silk-screened with a
regular grid pattern, these synthetic furniture pieces were
devoid of personality, individual design or decoration.
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Marco Zanini
teapot
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Leaving
behind the arcane theory and historicism of these earlier groups,
Ettore Sottsass set up the design studio ‘Memphis’ as a commercial
venture aimed at international sales. Memphis was formed to
provide an alternative to Modernism and the functionalist design
aesthetic which had reached a dead end. The group made a huge
impact at their first exhibition in 1981.
The name Memphis contained references to popular
culture (Memphis the home of Elvis) and to ancient culture (Memphis
the early centre of Egyptian civilisation).
The name suited them, with its wildly opposite associations,
for they explored the aesthetic and symbolic values of colour
using vivid colour contrasts, symbolism and surface decoration.
They explored the effects of the combination of different materials
and different shapes; and often all at once. Their designs had
the simplicity and impact of children’s toys, with their bright
colours and patterns.
‘Design
is no longer seen as a unity but as a sum of parts. We concentrate
more on the elements that determine an object than on the
object itself.’
Sottsass
gave design a new impetus through Memphis, placing Italy at
the centre of the postmodern movement, and it attracted designers
from all over the world. Using pop art, classicism, art deco,
and anything else that caught the designers eye, the Memphis
style had enormous influence. But Memphis was never an homogeneous
movement, rather, it was a group of designers sharing broad
aims.
Primary colours were used together to maximise contrast
and impact and patterned plastic laminates with designs copied
from popular graphics gave a festival and toylike aesthetic
to much of the Memphis products.
Sottsass saw function and utility in an object as secondary,
because he believed design was created by putting abstract conceptions
into practice, and objects, he said, should be regarded directly
as ideal works.
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Masanori
Umeda
floor lamp |
Masanori
Umeda was a prominent industrial designer, creating award winning
designs for Braun and Olivetti until in 1981 he joined the Memphis
group and transformed his style.
He adopted the humour and symbolism of the Memphis
culture, commenting on the industrial city culture of Japan,
creating designs that are cartoon-like in their humanism.
In his design, ‘Umeda stand’, the lamp becomes sculpture,
the function of the piece almost incidental. The base took on
the appearance of an animal-like sculpture, while the light
source retained an antique shade reminiscent of functionalist
style, creating an odd combination of images that stimulate
the imagination. The light-generating function of the object
appears to be of secondary importance, it seems.
While Memphis created exhibitions and exclusive experimental
pieces at the edge of avant garde design, the industrial,
mass-produced market is the most interactive one for designers
and society.
Mario Bellini designed striking, geometric ‘wedge’
shapes in the 70s for Olivetti typewriters and also for electronic
music equipment made by Yamaha. At the same time, he was wrapping
objects in a rubber or plastic membrane to give a more organic
feel to the objects, encasing the hard edged shapes of a calculator
in a rubber ‘skin’ to give the machine a welcoming, tactile
feel.
He did a similar thing with his Cab chair, covering
the simple steel frame of his chair with a zipped leather upholstery.
Creating a simple shape that glowed with the warm colours of
leather he personalised an essentially modernist chair with
an organic skin.
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Mario Bellini
Onda Quadra shelves
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In
the mid 80s, Bellini designed his Onda Quadra shelves, a study
in perspective as well as an architectonic approach to furniture
design. He was trained as an architect, a background he felt
was essential for industrial design, believing that this training
instilled the best understanding of ‘living and habitative culture’.
Luigi Colani retained the streamline style, using organic shapes
in designs for cameras, futuristic cars and domestic products.
He calls his style ‘hydrodynamic’ forms which are an aquatic
version of the teardrop design of the 30s.
In his ‘drop’ tea service, Colani minimised the
appearance of the lid and recessed the handle within the body
of the teapot. This achieved a clean profile that gives the
smooth outline of a teardrop, and at the same time allowing
the pot to be held close to its centre of gravity, making it
easy to pour.
Richard Sapper trained as an engineer, and produced a number
of designs in the 60s with Marco Zanuso including the Black
12 television which was designed to be easily stored when not
in use, it looked like a sleek cube. Because the appearance
of a blank TV screen was considered to be disturbing and intrusive,
they enclosed the tube in transparent black plastic which revealed
the tube only when it was turned on.
Sapper designed the Tizio table lamp in the early
70s, replacing the springs of the equipoise with counterbalanced
arms.
Unlike earlier counterbalanced lights, Sapper designed his Tizio
to have minimal weight and mass. This lightness combined with
a low voltage halogen bulb to produce a compact, concentrated
light source. The low voltage powering the lamp also allowed
him to eliminate enclosed wiring to the bulb, the arms themselves
carrying the current from the transformer in the base. Like
his TV, this lamp presented minimum visual impact, until it
was turned on.
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Richard
Sapper
kettle |
In
the 80s he created a strong visual appearance for IBM computer
products. He also designed kettles with references to steam
trains, the brass whistles sounding like the steam whistles
of locomotives and the whole kettle having a high-tech appearance
reminiscent of 70's design.
Michael Graves designed kettles too, placing a plastic
bird on his that opened a narrative element, the bright red
plastic bird lending humour to an otherwise common kitchen utensil.
His kettle in stainless steel is still mass produced, its styling
classical in the raised decoration near the base and its design
of a circle atop a cone.
Austrian architect and designer Matteo Thun joined fellow Austrian
Sottsass at the start of Memphis, but found that his output
was limited there, as the market for Memphis products was exclusive
- the products were expensive and required a sophistication
and appreciation of leading-edge fashion, attitudes lacking
in the mass market.
However at Memphis he developed his guiding principle
of finding the allegory or diverse meanings and multiple
associations inherent in all objects. Thun designed products
that introduced fiction as well as function. He called his style:
‘The Comic Allegory of Mattheo Thun, which serves to multiply
metaphors.’
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Matteo Thun
kettles
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Wanting
to create products for the mass market, he formed his own studio
in 1984 in Milan, designing for international firms such as
Alessi and Swatch. He preferred to design for a larger, more
general audience that was not concerned with the meaning of
design, rather wanting just to buy ‘things’.
His designs for furniture and domesticware in pressed
metal gave to the Bauhaus-derived principles of function and
severity of form, a sensual look.
A designer for the mass market, Thun concentrates
on the surface treatments of his products in order to enhance
the poetic qualities of the object.
For him, these products are not just simply items of everyday
use, but they should also be expressive media.
Another Austrian and architect, Hans Hollein, is one of the
most gifted of post-modern architects and designers. He exhibited
his furniture with Memphis and unlike much of the playful style
exhibited there, Hollein concentrated on the communicative power
of design. Fascinated by aircraft carriers, he designed a tea
trolley as.. well, an aircraft carrier.. the teapot and other
items looking ready to take off.
He designed the Marilyn sofa for Poltronova in 1985,
giving it the style of an art deco era Hollywood ‘couch’, with
its associations and aura of filmstars.
Mixing bold shapes, colours and materials to produce
objects that display a fascination with classicism, Hollein’s
work conjures up a range of associations. Postmodernism it seems,
could mean anything of any style as long as it wasn’t taken
from the period of classic ‘boxlike’ modernism between the wars.
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Carlos
Riart
Desnuda chair |
Carlos
Riart created whimsical, sometimes anthropomorphic designs,
such as his Desnuda chair which suggests a human presence (as
in Symbolist art). Sources for his inspiration came from many
and varied sources:
‘Japanese
art for its subtle system of construction; the so-called functional
style for its metrics; neo-classicism for its symmetry; art
nouveau for its ambiguity; ad-hocism for the materials used;
tantrism for colour; neo plasticism for its spatial projection;
magic for its use of the crystal as a repository of psychic
energy.’
The
brass crest on the top rail and the brass ‘feet’, together with
the pale blue colour on the metal frame and the informality
of the crossed stretchers, present a softer, more delicate effect
that diminishes the austere form and hard metal such chairs.
Shiro Kuramata turned design into alchemy, using wood and metal
in his designs to convey soft floating effects and an impression
of lightness, especially in his use of steel mesh materials.
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Shiro Kuramata
How High The Moon
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He
used common industrial materials in his interior designs and
furniture, transforming them into rich, poetic forms.
His armchair, ‘How High The Moon’, was constructed from expanded
steel mesh which he painted with a paint containing nickel or
copper to give it a sparkle. The high reflectance of this material
caused it to dissolve in light, minimising its impact in the
room.
Kuramata joined the mesh with welded seams, so precisely
welded that the airy mesh construction becomes a series of intersecting
planes without defined boundaries. Its effect is of a series
of crossing points; an apparently weightless, boundless volume
for the object’s size. The chair appears to float, much as the
moon above the horizon.
Asked whether the materials he used led to his designs,
Kuramata said he thought of the design first:
‘Once
I get my idea, I find materials literally by the roadside
and can utilise information gleaned from daily life.’
While
Italy was attracting international designers to Memphis, in
the rest of the world, other designers were creating anti-modernist,
eclectic and colourful furniture.
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Robert
Venturi
Sheraton chair
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Robert
Venturi in the United States during the late 60's saw Las Vegas
as a model for new design, presenting its roadside culture of
signs -bright, clashing and ugly, as a vocabulary for contemporary
style.
He created riotous furniture for Knoll, a range
of postmodern chairs that recalled famous historical chair styles
from Chippendale to the moderns. Often silkscreen printed in
bright patterns, the colours reflected the Memphis style as
well as the silkscreen prints of Andy Warhol.
The chairs relied on their silhouettes and printed patterns
to create their personality, being otherwise simple, bent plywood
constructions. Like stage sets, from the front view the chairs
look substantial, but from the side they appear as they are
made, simple thin moulded plywood forms. Venturi’s chairs embodied
the postmodern characteristics of ‘quoting’ other design styles,
displaying his furniture as props for deeper ideas and meanings.
Phillipe
Starck, a French designer who established his reputation in
the early 80s with his designs for rooms in the Elysee Palace,
combines the flair of a decorative artist with a sound engineering
sensibility. He wittily alludes to the tail fin of a whale in
his clock design called ‘Walter Wayle II’.
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Phillipe Starck
desklamp
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He said about the intellectualism of his work:
‘Not
being a Minimalist like the Scandinavians, nor serious like
the Germans, nor austere like the Spanish, nor creative like
the Italians, the French can only claim the qualities of thoughtfulness
and balance…I aim for my work to have this French quality.’
His
desklamp from the late 80s produced a design that was at once
elemental in its allusion to the bullfight, the horn-like shape
of the shade conjuring this image; and timeless in that it also
looked like it came off Captain Nemo’s desk (20,000 Leagues
Under The Sea).
Designing for comfort and ergonomics became an increasing concern
of designers as environmental issues proliferated. The world
ecology, wildlife and health issues inspired designers to explore
functionalism in entirely new ways.
Norwegian designer Peter Opsvik worked with Hans
Christian Mengshoel in a scientific study of comfortable seating
to design a range of ergonomic seating that placed the sitter’s
bodyweight on the knees. Introduced in 1979, the lightweight
metal and wood Balans chair could rock, thus eliminating backache
and promoting blood circulation through the muscular movement
that it allows. This design and others from Norway led to the
proliferation of posture furniture.
Niels Diffrient worked for Eero Saarinen as a modelmaker, later
helping Henry Dreyfuss develop his ‘Humanscale’ study of ergonomic
design, which became the standard text for designers concerned
with design issues about peoples’ convenience.
He concentrated on seating where people must sit
in the same place for sustained periods of time, especially
in transport and offices. He felt that much modern furniture
had failed in its aim of being comfortable, that the drive to
make a chair that looked new had only resulted in bent steel
designs that were hard to sit in.
‘There
is no perfect chair…The best chair is only good for a few
hours, and then you ought to get up. A perfect chair is a
bed.’
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Niels
Diffrient
Jefferson armchair
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Diffrient
viewed the designers role as someone who sees the way people
live, and can visualise how things can be improved. While the
concept ‘form follows function’ has become unfashionable, representing
as it does the Modernist desire to replace unnecessary decoration
with spare forms, Diffrient said that an understanding of how
an object’s form reveals its function is essential to see how
it will be effective as design. Not as a stylistic uncovering
of the mechanism of the object, but as a way of ensuring that
the product will function well in its intended environment.
This, he said, indicates a deeper role for a designer
than the superficial manipulation of fashionable shapes -a dig
perhaps, at Memphis ‘style’.
Jasper Morrison began designing furniture in Britain during
the 80s, creating furniture that was practical and a manufacturing
success. His work has an understated look, reflecting his aim
of using simple materials such as plywood and fabrics in an
appropriate manner to produce liveable furniture. Concentrating
on the combination of basic materials rather than the addition
of ornament, his aim is to design for the requirements of modern
living. Speaking of plywood he said:
‘It's
a plus starting with a cheap material…it's upgraded by the
way it's used. Generally, I try to achieve something quite
humble in its materials and not screamingly loud in its shape.’
In
complete contrast, Ron Arad makes expressive furniture out of
metal, glass and even concrete. Inspired by the ‘punk’ movement
in Britain in the late 70s and 80s, he formed his One Off company
to design and manufacture experimental furniture, using industrial
materials and junk such as old car seats and medical equipment.
His original aim was to produce low cost custom
designs that emphasised recycling, novelty and invention. He
took a seat out of a Rover car and attached it to a metal frame.
Ironically calling his static piece the ‘Rover’ chair, he referred
to it as his one ‘English’ design, for it celebrates what he
saw as the British love for their cars. In this piece, the sitter
could enjoy the comfort of the leather seat without the distraction
of traffic.
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Ron Arad
Strict Family series
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Using
welded steel as his material, Arad made armchairs and seating,
utilising the springiness of steel for his collection of simple,
eccentric chairs. Calling the chairs his ‘Strict Family’ series,
he portrayed different family personalities in the individual
designs, avoiding the uniform, anonymous look of metal furniture
in the modern style.
His Big Easy series of armchairs are hollow, welded steel
forms which imitate the rounded overstuffed shapes of traditional
upholstered furniture in a freely sculpted manner. His furniture
is at once primitive and futuristic, and is designed to be comfortable
while at the same time creating the appearance and aura of hard,
unyielding surfaces, although some of these chairs he covered
with material, giving them a softer look.
In welding the chairs together, Arad took the patterns
from a series of freehand sketches, and used the cutting torch
in a freehand way, so the shapes he cut from the same pattern
were all different. And when he welded them together the pieces
went together differently, making each one an individual or
‘one off’ chair.
With the creases and irregular folds amplified in
the highly reflective surfaces, Arad succeeded in his aim of
creating expectations and breaking them.
(His concrete stereo system gave new resonance to the term ‘rock
music’.)
Chaos theory originated in science, as a way of defining the
difficulty in understanding the chaotic, random chain of events
in the natural world. For example, it was suggested a butterfly
flapping its wings in one continent had some effect on the weather
patterns of another.
This theme of inexplicable connections and apparent
randomness in the natural world was picked up as a neat metaphor
in the design world, and it was applied to the wide and diverse
directions design was following in the wake of postmodernism.
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Shiro
Kuramata
How High The Moon
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Design
is no longer seen just as a way to make objects function, but
to encompass ideas, culture and social concerns. The inspiration
of the designer and the idea of communication through the object
is becoming at times more important than the object itself.
Creative chaos is a term designers applied
to an attitude in their work which rejected a single, ordered
approach. Design as visual shapes increasingly became design
as ideas, ideas that borrowed from art history, films and culture,
past and present. The variety of design movements in the 90s
reflects the wide ranging tastes of an increasingly technological
and specialised world. Postmodernism has left the legacy of
a much more sophisticated consumer, while design leans strongly
towards the decorative, and draws on the legacy of past design
history.
A few basic features that are still apparent are
the rejection of Functionalism and Modernism. Curved and swinging
lines have dominated objects (cars, electronics, etc) - but
that will all change. Design is going online, international
communication of ideas can be immediate and universal. Where
will that lead to? Use your modem to find out..
QMR97
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