Why Not Associates, thirty years on
The design studio celebrates its 30th birthday with the most comprehensive exhibition of its work to date, opening at Sheffield Institute of Arts
Andy Altmann, David Ellis and Howard Greenhalgh met at the Royal College of Art. Upon graduation in 1987, they formed Why Not Associates.
This was a time of great change in graphic design as the Apple Mac first began to make its presence felt. But the trio had cut their teeth in an earlier time of acetate and fax machines. Their priority when setting up their first studio in London’s Archer Street? A darkroom. Their biggest investment? The best black and white photocopier money could buy. This was a practice built on experimentation and collaboration – with light and shadow, with technology, with materials, and often with photographer Rocco Redondo. A place where there was still room for the ‘happy accident’.
This attitude is suggested by the studio name itself. The story goes that a fellow RCA student, in his thesis on Bob Gill, compared the rigour of the great ‘ideas-based’ designers of the 60s with the approach of Altmann, Ellis and Greenhalgh. When he asked why they were pursuing a particular method of working, they once replied ‘why not?’ The name, and the open, ‘let’s make it and see what happens’ approach, stuck.
Thirty years later, the studio (now run by Altmann and Ellis after Greenhalgh left in 1993 to pursue a directing career) remains as committed as ever to this love of making and doing.
Perhaps its most high-profile project to date, the Comedy Carpet collaboration with artist Gordon Young, required 160,000 letters to be made out of 30mm solid granite and cast into hundreds of concrete panels. A former fish processing factory in Hull was converted by Young into a bespoke factory in order to handle the volume of work required. There was cutting and fettling, curing, grinding and polishing. It was public art as heavy industry – or heavy industry as public art.
For Why Not, such a process is often as interesting as its result. Their work will now get its biggest ever UK show – a retrospective at Sheffield Institute of Arts’ Post Hall Gallery opening on November 25.
The show runs until December 22. Details here